all this whining and moaning...

Now John Derbyshire, a conservative's conversative (a concon, I guess, hahahaha) is bemoaning the current state of the "conservative" movement.
And damn it all to hell, I can't figure out how to copy and paste. I'm going to have to finish this later. Although I just have to say to conservatives, libertarians, idiotarians, evangelicals, objectivists, John Birch fans, the whole spectrum of what nominally constitutes the right alliance:

1. We will never, ever be able to defeat socialism here on Earth.
2. We will never, ever be able to bring about a return of the Constitution in exile.
3. We will never, ever dismantle the monstrosity that is the United States federal government.
4. We will never, ever be able to convince a substantial plurality of what constitutes the left alliance to abandon their utopian fantasies and come and live in the real world.
5. We are stuck with these realities.

There is again only one solution, but it would take a multi-generation effort of unprecedented scale and scope. It would require that all you conservative intellectuals go back to school and get engineering and physics and particle physics and mechanical engineering and biology and nanotech degrees. It would require every right alliance family to have as many children as they can afford. It would require every conservative moving to consolidate power in a long-term strategic goal of creating not just a political powerbase, but a strategic one as well. And it would require us recognizing that the only way our children and grandchildren will be able to live freely is to leave this planet behind and found colonies within the solar system and within neighboring star systems as quickly as possible. If the energies of the conservative intellectual movement were dedicated to this, possibility, we might actually make it happen.
Otherwise, conservatives should accept what their self-chosen identity really means: that you are left to stand athwart history yelling stop, but not accomplishing anything. In the end, conservatives can only delay socialisms onslaught.
That is of course, why I am not a conservative. There is nothing about our civilization, ultimately that I want to "conserve". To me, the rule of law, market economics, and representative, limited, constitutional government are not conservative ideas. They are revolutionary ideas and will forever remain so. They cannot be institutionalized because there are no institutions to preserve, only the idea itself, and these ideas have expanded over time. The rule of law did not originally apply to all people. Just as today, the rule of law would not extend to a faulty AI that malfunctioned, but one day it will. The market economy of today is vastly different from the one we inherited from our mostly agricultural forefathers. And representative, limited, constitutional government is the most radical idea ever! To value these concepts as highly as I do is to be a liberal, not a conservative. To be a liberal is to be a socialist today and we should stop giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to identification. I say you are not a liberal, you are a socialist and I am a liberal! The dubiousness by which the early 20th century progressives (another codeword for socialists that simply didn't stick after people got tired of all their hewing and hawing and just wanted to do what Americans have always wanted to do, have a good time, make some money, and then have a good time) transformed themselves into the liberals of the 30's sickens me. It sickens me that we allowed a conservative/liberal political axis to develop where before there had been none. Differences were differences of policy, not ideology. Everyone in America shared the same ideology, and that ideology was the ideology of the Founders.
We will never be able to bring that time back, and while with hard work and multiple generations of perservearance we might be able to slowly tilt the pendulum away from the inevitable, ultimately, we will be faced with the stark reality that the America that we want simply is not ever going to be. We will have to live with OSHA and the EPA and all the hated alphabet soup agencies and regulations and forms and bullshit that surrounds our daily lives until, well, until. There are no good solutions, there are only choices. And yes, we have terrible choices. The Republicans and the Democrats. Terrible choices. The Republicans hew and haw the right alliance dogma but do nothing about it. The Democrats just made their first tactical political manuever of the 21st century a couple of weeks ago; let's just say the learning curve on that side of the aisle is apparently stuck on stupid. (I'm talking about the Dems not commenting on the Miers controversy). Live in America and watch our culture collapse or leave and risk our lives in a possibly futile effort to colonize the galaxy.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

contemplating some changes...

I've been reading Ray Kurzweil's new book, The Singularity is Near, along with several others, including The FairTax by Neal Boortz and John Linder and The West's Last Chance by Tony Blankley.
And I've been thinking. I've been trying to avoid writing too much about anything because I've been thinking so much and I've come to realize that writing is not so much a release of information as it is a distraction from organizing information in your mind. Oh the occasional flash of brilliance appears without thinking about it, simply letting your mind do the talking, but usually, it's just the same old same old. I tell you a story, you read the story, and there we go, that's that.
We're approaching an epochal moment in the history of the human race, and not just epochal in terms of its magntiude, but of the significance to every human being. We are on the verge of being able to ensure that barring some hostile alien invasion force, no longer will we be carrying all of our eggs in one basket. I look at the trivial nature of politics and I shriek in horror that I find so much of it fascinating, that this ho-hum national undebate that is going on because of Harriet Myer, I just cant' believe I let it consume my time the way that I do. Reading what everyone is saying, thinking about the President's strategic goals, wondering if Karl Rove had a meeting with some Indian tribe and maybe smoked the peace pipe...all of this is unimportant to the task at hand: getting ourselves off this god forsaken planet and into infinity.
Oh blah blah, it's too early in the morning for that Star Trek crap. People flying around the galaxy, colonizing thousands upon thousands of star systems, the human race multiplying and bringing order to chaos. But, what about the speed of light? And what about all the damage we've done to this planet, forget about all those others, and don't we have enough problems down here without needing to bring them up there?
Whine, bitch and moan.
I'm tired of it all. I'm tired of hearing that the Pakistanis and the Indians can't agree to just draw a line down the middle of their disputed territory. I'm tired of worrying about whether or not there will be enough Europeans in the middle of this century to maintain their marginally Western characterisits. I'm tired of worrying about when China will invade Taiwan and what will happen to me because of it. I'm tired of the Palestinians, I'm tired of the Kurds, the Shiites, the Sunnis, Robert Mugabo, Mexican immigrants, Canadian incompetence, I'm tired of waiting for the right Supreme Court nominee to bring the constitution in exile back, I'm tired of defending Dubya by arguing that it's better than a Democrat would have been, of ungrateful South Koreans and Phillipinos, I'm tired of the whole damn planet and I'm really sick and tired of having my fate determined by individuals who aren't living my life. Oh, but we live in a free society, you can choose what you want to do! More whining. Sure, I can choose within a certain context what I want to do with my life, but I cannot determine what the rest of the human race. There are enough people on this planet who want my way of life to end and the only way to really guarantee that nothing like would happen would require the kind of warfare unimagined in the 20th century, the kind of total, uninhibited by ethical constraints (think about what Ann Coulter said right after 9/11 and I'm paraphrasing: We need to go into their cities, kill their leaders, and force them to convert to Christianity or die themselves.) Short of that, or a genuine self-purge by Muslims, I fail to see how this little "problem" that we have so aptly named the GWOT (rather than officially declaring war on all state-sponsors of terrorism and their affiliates, mandating us to finish this to the bitter end, officially as in an act of Congress, which is the way that war is supposed to be declared and yet another reason to view Dubya as having betrayed the conservative movements trust) is going to go away or that we are going to derail it without removing the three big remaining supporters, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria and without doing so, we are doomed to the inevitable failure that will result as soon as a Democrat is elected President.
So I want off the planet. It's official. Not that it was ever really in doubt for anyone who ever really knew me, but the fact remains that nothing is going to change because change is illusory. What really happens is that the people experiencing the world change, and thus, because they are different from the people who were here before, they believe that things have changed. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you could send an email a hundred years ago, hell more than a hundred years ago. It was called a telegram and it got there just about as fast as it does now. Of course, unless you had a switching station at your house you couldn't do it from home and you couldn't expect an immediate reply, but the effect was the same. And the same is true with a letter, you're just sending bits of information, simply at a much slower rate, and the same is true with language. Things have only sped up and now we have the 24 hour news cycle that must be filled with all the meaningless meanderings of an age that thinks that two hurricanes hitting within a few days of each other is "news". That's old hat my fine fellow. News is supposed to be new.
I would trade all of the planetary pleasures the Earth has to offer to be working to terraform Mars right now. Being able to breathe freely on the surface without a suit on, forget about it. Sunbathing, forget about it, except maybe through special glass that filters out what the Earth's atmosphere does for me. Being able to visit historical spots and enjoying viewing what awe inspiring wonders the human race has created. Tut-tut, I need none of that. Forced to live underground, carving out a tiny little sphere of existence on a harsh and alien surface, armed only with my wits and bravado and my nanobots and genetically enhanced body of course, but there, carving out of my tiny little sphere a place where one day people will walk without suits and breathe the air freely. Somebody dig up Robert Heinlein's body and get to work on reanimating it because we need to get moving today. Forget about building oil refineries, our new nuclear power plants. What if the goal of the United States was for it's citizens to become the first citizens of the Solar System and to say to hell with the rest of ya! You guys figure out how to live with each other. We thought we had something pretty good going on down there, but NOOOOOOOOOOOOO you had to bring in your international treaties and non governmental organizations and people like PETA and the Sierra Club and the infanticide maniacs and all the other bullshit that comprises so much of what passes for civilization these days. How long do you think it would be before everyone was at each other's throats, because that's how it was for most of human history. Everyone was at each other's throats. There was no PC. There were no mixed messages. Why can't everyone see how ridiculous (except that I see that on Amazon there's a fantastic book I'm thinking about buying....).
Of course, for those of you who do know me, I talk the talk, but would I really be interested in leaving the planet, pretty much permanently, because Martian gravity is less than Earth's it would be unlikely that I would be able to return, ever. I could visit worlds of similar or lesser gravity, but never back home, my muscles would not be able to handle the stress, much less my bones (although there is still substantial debate on how resilient the human body is; we just won't know until we try). As it says over to your left, nothing like recognizing that we're all hypocrites. People so easily mock our flaws, but it's our flaws that I think are our best feature. Without flaws, we would never know virtues, and without flaws, we could never truly appreciate how diametrically contradictory existence is, and that's really the key. We have the technology to do all these things, we could build a fleet of nuclear powered ships to begin traversing the inner solar system and ferrying materials and people to Mars and the moon and the larger asteroids, of which Ceres, might contain more freshwater than our entire planet does!
And yet, the closest I'll probably get to space is any one of the numerous video games that I sometimes entertain and occassionaly challenge myself with.
And that saddens me. To think that we are capable of so much, yet doing so little. To know that the capacity for greatness is there, yet it just holds back, waiting, watching, wondering, ultimately we are more content with dreaming ideas than we are actually doing them. Imagining a great idea is comforting, trying to build it in this world, terrifying, because the threat of annihilation, of retribution, of vengeance plain and simple, of being drafted to fight the Chinese, any of these things, it is what must be overcome and it is what must also be avoided. How to balance on a two edged sword. The answer is jump off the sword you fool.

the shot heard round the Sphere...

Much of the BlogoSphere has been stunned by the news of Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court. Much has been said about the President, and much has been said about the current state of the conservative movement in this country, without much of anything really having been said at all.
First there's this, which was a few days ago, but arguably needs to be read to put you in the right mindset. The second term doldrums have already started, everyone whines (all you have to do is look at the vacillating meanderings of say those at The Corner or to Hugh Hewitt's incessant and unnecessary realpolitik support of the GOP) to see that really the problem is that everyone gets up everyday and decides its time to write something about what's happened, even though I really don't know much about what has happened, or haven't thought about it very much, or talked to anyone else...
It's the Sphere's first and biggest problem. Andrew Sullivan fell victim to something similar when he attacked Miers as supposedly being part of an organization whose mission is to "cure" people of homosexuality. So far, there has been only one measured response to the Miers nomination, and frankly it is so persuasive in its' simplicity that I can't believe I didn't think about it first.
The article comes from The American Thinker, which I highly recommend, but enough of that. The author, Thomas Lifson, demands that we step back from our pajama clad refuges and realize that there's more at work here than we care to admit. The President is not an ignoramus, as many of his enemies and allies have been led to believe. He was educated at Harvard Business School, which apparently among other things, emphasizes group dynamics, and while yes, I would have preferred the President nominate Janice Rogers Brown or Luttig or McConnell, he has chosen someone whose abilities she brings to group will make her the most valuable member of the US Supreme Court. I don't Scalia or Thomas or even Roberts bending over backwards to help fulfill the needs of the group, or getting Ginsburg tea or any of the things that a woman of Miers capabilities will be able to do: breakdown the personal and emotional barriers that many of those on the court have against the other side.
Let us also not forget that nominations to the Supreme Court are political calculations. Bush is almost certainly aware of the fact that by disappointing those on the Left who secretly yearned for Brown or Luttig or Estrada nomination he has succeeded in only making them more pissed off. "How dare the President nominate his personal lawyer, how dare he subject the nation to such cronyism, why, she's never even been a judge before!" Some of the best Supreme Court Justices were not judges before coming to the court, several come to mind, Byron White and Robert Jackson first instance. By pissing the Left off more, Bush forces them to do front and center combat on his terms, because they will be the ones out there scouring Miers' records for anything that they can criticize her for...you can almost sense how they're just waiting to accuse her of being a lesbian...shhhh...don't say it yet, they're not ready. Although Drudge's main headline is indeed the first signs.
Finally, Bush will almost certainly make at least one more appointment. John Paul Stevens is 85. Scalia and Kennedy are both 69, Souter is 66, Ginsburg is 72 and has had cancer, Breyer is 67. The youngest are of course Roberts who is 50 and Thomas who is 57, with Miers at 60. If Stevens makes it through to January of 2009 I'd be really, really surprised. As well with with the others. Bush will make at least one more appointment, possibly two, and possible three more. Life's little vagaries are never predictable. But this I will predict. Miers will be on the bench with a vote of at least 75-35 and possibly 80-20 and Stevens will be dead before the midterm elections of 2006, giving both Roberts and Miers time enough to prove to the conservative movement that they have the right stuff and time for Bush to nominate someone like Janice Rogers Brown or Luttig.
Now if I can only convince the administration that the way to really move forward on domestic issues is by moving forward on foreign ones, like bombing Syria for instance.

cry out, ophelia!

That's Twelfth Night. Very good Chuck.
Ahem, sorry.
The clarity of purpose that I was assumed drove all great people is completely obfuscated in my mind. How best to hasten the death blow to the Democrats? Is that really what we need since they seem to be doing a fine job of making themselves irrelevant? Is a bloated majority government that is indeed only a conservative one (it's important to consult Friedrich Hayek at the end of "The Constitution of Liberty" to see his excellent postscript entitled, "Why I am not a conservative to understand what I am going to talk about it; in it, Hayek argues that the European scheme of conservative versus liberal has been but merely exported in name only to the US; what we have are conservatives and socialists. I am a liberal. There is nothing about American civilization that I wish to conserve. I want to use the amendment process for radical change, I believe in the absorption of foreign nation-states, and the expansion into the Solar System. There is nothing conservative about what I believe except my belief in the rule of law, representative, limited and constitutional government, and the market economy; but that isn't to say that I don't think that we can't improve upon those concepts, it only means that I think it's a safe bet to stick with those ideas because they have gotten us this far and until we figure out something better we had better to adhere to a few guidelines. Charles Schumer and Rangel and for that part most of the House Democratic caucus and a significant portion of the Senate are indeed socialists. They don't even understand that they are indeed socialists, most of them at least, and those that do would never openly admit it. A terrible game of hide and seek is being played out across America and the Left needs to come clean. But enough with that) is that a government that we would want...phew...
No, but really, can't the "conservatives" govern with the realization that change is going to happen and that we've got to foster that change, to nurture it, to provide it the fertile soil it needs to grow in? Can we integrate India fully into the Anglosphere? Can we Anglosize Iraq and Afghanistan to a substantial degree that they become the Germany and the South Korea of the Cold War, with India as the Japan and Australia as the 51st, 52nd and however many other states that they have? Can we beat the Chinese?
And so much of this falls back to whether or not the Left can be exposed as what it is to the vast majority of the American public so that it completely loses all trust in the Left and the Democrats, the oldest political party on the planet, go the way of the Whigs and the Federalists and the Soviets...into the ash heap of history. That will of course split the majority party into the Conservative Party and a purified Republican/Liberal Party that will retake the liberal mantra and make the socialists completely irrelevant.
Here's a proposition I have that will split the Left: universal health care vouchers for universal school vouchers. An even swap. Through a process of indexing and massive statistical calculations, we could arrive at an approximate amount your healthcare will cost over the course of your life. Simply by filling in all the blanks: ethnicity, health history, family health history, etc. A long time ago I pointed out that there is nothing more insane than paying someone to pay someone else. I went to the doctor to get my fingernail drained, I had slammed it in the door. I waited for more than an hour, and then, they took me back and weighed me and took my bloodpressure. Now, I know that's just standard procedure, but then I sat in the room for thirty more minutes and then a nurse came in and said, Mr Maley, let's go get your X-rays and I said, I didn't request any X-rays.
The arrogance of it all. Oh, he doesn't want any x-rays she said, loudly back to the room. I said no, I explained to the front desk lady that all I wanted was to have some holes drilled in my nail to realize this blood please!
Fifteen more minutes.
Finally, the doctor comes in, has me lay down and drills two little holes into my fingernail. Time to completion: thirty seconds. Time to relief, as soon as the blood started flowing.
And then I sat there another fifteen minutes. But hey, I say to myself, echoing Jonah's thoughts from the other day, at least if feels better.
As I exit I find that despite having told the front desk lady she is about to charge me for the x-ray that I did not want and did not have. Still, the bill came to around $170. I said, you've got to be kidding me. Am I paying to sit around? For the two hours that I was here that $170 would have paid both the front desk ladies, the nurse who weighed me and took my bloodpressure, and let's get a little more specific. Let's say that both front desk ladies make $20 an hour, so that's $80, and the nurse makes $30 an hour, so that's $60, for the two hours I was there my $170 would have paid there salaries...is that how they arrive at the number? Because the only thing I should have paid for was the doctor drilling into my fingernail, at most, at the most, I would have been under normal market circumstances paid no more than $40 TO THE DOCTOR BECAUSE HE'S THE ONE WHO IS DOING IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Let's pick a comparitive situation: you get a nail stuck in your tire. You arrive at the tire place and you're told what they have available and then you tell them it's just a nail and they say well, we can't do it right and you say, fine, I'll go somewhere ELSE and they say, ok, ok, and fifteen minutes later your tire is patched and away you go and it didn't cost you anymore than $40.
The problem is that we view all healthcare expenditures as costs. We don't view them as investments. And consequently every health decision is made based on how much the procedure will costs instead of how much we're investing in the productivity of a person, in their happiness, in their contentment, in their lifelong Gross Self Product and how much that contributes to our nation-states Gross Domestic Product. If we viewed such things as investments then every company would have mandatory exercise regimens: a fit employee is a healthy employee is an employee that's investing in their health and saving the company money in the long-term because most old age diseases can be mitigated substantially through healthy living and we simply don't offer people any immediate compensation for such prudent behavior. Imagine that we issued everyone a booklet of healthcare vouchers, each one equal to a set amount, and each one redeemable through either a private/public institution such as the Federal Reserve, or through a private consortium monitored by a government agency. These vouchers would be available through means-testing or by purchasing a health-savings account (instead of health insurance, to encourage the formation of capital) with a certified voucher accepting company. The incentive would be to SAVE your vouchers and view each doctors' as means of prevention not active care. We have come to view doctors as the ones who can solve all of our biochemical problems; somehow the human race survived without taking your child to the doctor for every cold, bump, bruise, or yourself for every ache, or pain, we have got to find ways to improve our health without relying soley on healthcare professionals. This would have the effect of flattening the market, providers would have an added incentive to actually treat patients quickly because the neutral value of the vouchers and because people would be free to choose ANY doctor.
This deal would have the added benefit of destroying the public school system and allowing choice and competition to enter there too and the argument on the left that nobody has access to healthcare blah blah would be completed mitigated.
A win win.

incrementalism; the only way

I have just reread Jonah Goldberg at NRO and I'm thinking about stopping to read it again.
Okay.
The first thing I want to point out is that there seems to be this depressing melancholy surrounding the right side of the 'Sphere, this attitude, well, this is the best that we can hope for.
Tish, pushaw and nonsense! The elections of 2006 are but a year and a little ways away--nothing we can do about the fact that the conservative movement, the movement that put the GOP into power? Nothing you say?
If the Republican Congress does not have the legislative cojones to simply cut all spending except for the war effort and maybe SocSec and maybe Medicaid with the prescription drug plan ended down by WHATEVER PERCENTAGE necessary to balance the budget then we should punish them. We may think that the GOP Congress is better than an a Democratic Congress but I promise you that the idea of the Dem's running the Houses scares the jeepers out of the GOP a lot more than we are scared of it. We should put the fear of God into our elected representatives to do what we elected them to do, not to just shore up the beast, as Jonah puts it. Succumbing to the sublime notion of "it's out of my hands" is not the way to approach this problem. Doing something about it is.
For the past week or so, the Porkbusters movement has begun to gather, well, it has begun to gather. And some have made some significant theoretical progress (follow the link and the play the game, it's fun!) but nothing concrete. A while back I floated the idea that bloggers should take the government to task using the sunshine laws to force every government bureaucracy to open its books to outside analysis. That's still not a bad idea, but as not so bad ideas go, there are significant logistical hurdles to clear, as with the extension of that idea, that a consortium of bloggers unite to take the GOP to task for failing to live up to it's constituents.
Now, to see an example of such a consortium all you have to do is look at the evangelicals. Look at these highly intelligent, highly capable individuals who spend a significant amount of time devoted to something that just isn't going to change anything within our political process. For people like me, who sees no difference between religion and ideology, I see that effort as nothing more than wasted. All you have to do is look at what drives most of the conflicts on the planet and realize that even the past century's horrific violence was a direct result of people holding a belief system to be more important than the world around them.
Now, the question facing bloggers, after the mild successes of the past: the Eason Jordan scandal and resignation, calling Rather's bluff, helping to overcome the inherent bias of the MSM, what can we accomplish together? But more importantly, we, as members of the conservative, libertarian, traditionalist movement, have to realize that while we think we know how to solve our problems as a nation-state, we cannot accomplish it in a day, or in one administration, or in one decade. The Left understood intuitively and overtly that they would never be able to get their ultimate agenda imposed upon the country. They understood that they only way to hoodwink people was to propose gradual changes that would eventually lead to the oligarchy that we now possess; and to deny that we are an oligarchy is to deny the nature of the beast. What we must do is begin the gradual, generation long effort to dismantle this oligarchy piece, by piece. We must have a comprehensive agenda, and we must come together as a community to devise what that agenda must be. The parties cannot be changed from within. Look at how being the majority has made the Republicans essentially the Democrats. Nothing really has changed, except in the prosecution of the war effort and some adjustments to our Byzantine tax code and some new free trade agreements. Other than that, this administration has been the 21st century's LBJ. There can be no disputing it. We can only hope to force the GOP leadership to recognize the value of our efforts by ourselves recognizing that we can no more be pawns to them than they are to us. It's a two way street, everything is a trade-off. They don't want to cut spending on all non-defense related spending by whatever percentage necessary to balance the budget, tomorrow? Than we as a movement withdraw our support from the GOP and split the ticket by voting for either independents, libertarians, greens, or no one. They want to be the majority party, fine by us, then they had better start acting like it. If, as Jonah puts it, moderate Republicans are responsible Democrats, than we had better start thinking of how to bring more conservative Republicans into leadership posts and taking the hits if necessary to get rid of the RINO's. I'd rather have a conservative Democrat in a Senate seat than a RINO anyday of the week.
The first step toward realizing that we must strive for incrementalism is that we must prioritize. What can we do now to change things best for the long term, what policy options are most important to us? What laws or constitutional amenments should we support that can begin to unravel the oligarchy? I think the first is obvious: we must break the back of K street and we must go to back to a time when an individual could contribute as much as he or she wanted to a political party, while simultaneously banning all contributions from entities other than individuals. Why do we allow corporate entities, labor unions, etc., to lobby the government? Why do we allow them to contribute money to political parties? Individuals are the backbone of the political process, not the pinky dammit! The only way to break the back of K street is to repeal the 16th amendment, otherwise, we'll end up with something like the FairTax and an income tax and then we'll be really screwed.

So, objective number one: repealing the 16th amendment. How many states do we need to pass a constitutional amendment, three fourths if I remember correctly. How many states in the union would be able to pass an amendment repealing the 16th? How many of those states is support guaranteed? We must take a strategic and tactical outlook on the situation. If repeal is not possible immediately, settle for the repeal of the current code and the institution of a consumption tax.
Objective number two: repeal all campaign finance restrictions, let the money go to the parties. One the reasons that the Democrats have become so weakened is that they are nothing more than a song and dance show, they are the real power on the Left. The power on the Left resides in the myriad of alphabet soup interest groups who can see past their sprout salad to realize that they have turned themselves into a generation of political weaklings. Wealthy individuals control the Left, and the Left purports to be for the common man. It really is funny, but the same thing has happened to a lesser degree on the right. There the alphabet soup interest groups can't see past the Constitution on their desks to realize that the destruction of that document did not happen overnight. Only individuals vote, so only individuals can contribute.
Objective number three: Find a better way to handle appropriations. Clearly the current committee system just isn't working with regard to appropriations and legislation in general. A general change in rules would probably be easiest, something along the lines of, ahem, this is really a crazy idea people: a bill shall only contain language pertaining to the subject matter of the bill. No amendments. No mechanism for pork to just appear.
Objective Number Four: Out and oust the RINO's. Better to be the minortiy party with people who actually share beliefs rather than a majority party cobbled together out of various factions and special interest groups. An effective, principled minority can often be more a boon for the population than a hobbled, bloated majority that simply does what everyone wants, spend money!
Objective Number Five: Become proactive. We need a blogging clearinghouse of activities that need to be completed. This congressman hasn't received his daily allotment of mail, this federal agency has yet to be audited, so on and so forth. We need to stop sitting around reading the news and go out there and make the news. That's why the whole MSM is collapsing in around itself and why people like me have turned off the TV, stopped reading the major papers, and turned to the sphere for virtually all of my information. People have started to realize that journalists are not just not indepedent story tellers, they make events happen because they aren't reporting, they're investigating, and investigations always lead to some kind of series of events. We need to put a stop to the idea right now of citizen journalists and brand ourselves as citizen investigators who will no longer tolerate corruption, ineffeciency, and bloated and unnecessary bureaucracies that do not support the public good.

So stop moping Jonah, and go do something about it!

a long time ago, in a post far far away

I talked about the divide between Red and Blue State America. I'd be interested to see if anyone has put together any data concerning where the money for the relief effort came from, and whether or not there's a connection between current charity efforts and past data, and whether or not my guess, that Red State America gave either a greater average individual amount per capita or a larger nominal amount altogether. Just a side thought.
As an almost unwilling member of the Republican coalition, I remind myself every day that all choices ultimately are bad choices. Even two great choices may pale in comparison to an opportunity that will present itself at the next moment, one that you will no longer be able act upon because of your previous choice. And right now, as there pretty much always has been in American history, we have two choices. The Republicans or the Democrats. That's the way it's been since the Civil War, and no matter how much the various third-parties (look at the way we turn that into a plural) want to believe they are having an impact, that's pretty much the way that it will always be. Not much that can be done about it, accept it and move on.
However, I saw something interesting on Instapundit from one of his readers:

uhm. I can't quite seem how to figure to paste anything right now. I'll come back to it. But the readers message essentially argued whether or not a Republican minority might have more success reducing Democratic spending than a majority unable to contain itself. I myself had convinced myself that the GOP needed only to get into office and undue the damage done to federalism through inept and excessive government spending...alas, that has not yet come to pass. And of course, what it means is that the parties are merely a symptom of the problem, not the ultimate cause. I could easily pass blame on K-street, which is very very easy, but again, they are merely symptoms of the problem. Malpractice lawsuits, government unions, an unnecessarily complex and convoluted federal code, blah blah blah. We have more problems than anyone can name, and we have more problems than really, honestly, can ever be fixed.
Unless of course....
Think of this: if a law does not have an expiration date, or, if no law has been passed to alter it, than that law is on the books. Part of the whole common law tradition, of recognizing that we stand on the shoulders of giants and maybe we should trust our forebears intuitions more than our own, and partly because nobody really cares that it's illegal to have wear your hat sideways walking down the street backwards playing "oh my darlin clementine" or that you can beat your wife on the steps of the courthouse for one minute at midnight without fear of recrimination. Honestly. Solution? It's time to use the amendment process of the Constitution...oh wait, that's not going to happen either...sigh.
Forcing all legislation to be temporary would lead to the immediate removal of thousands of pages of ridiculous regulations that right now are just about as stupid as the Left is behaving. Again, both symptoms, not the cause.
So why are divided by politics? Why have we literally became to separate, self-contained worlds? I can't think about it now. It's hurting my head.

an Italian from Brooklyn...

During World War II, 2 percent of Americans lived in Brooklyn, and if read the whole little bit and down a bit below my bit that I'm quoting, you'll see that that urban megapolis that stretches from New York down through Jersey and Connecticut and Pennsylvania still to this day contains 6 percent of our population. Now, I'm not trying to quote Barone word for word, who better to quote word for word if I were to actually do so, but my point is that a lot of people live in that great big giant urban insanity in what I like to call, that place way up there North that unless I one day have to play a show there I never intend to visit.
But honestly I think that we need is someone who can take the experience of having lived, managed, directed, improved, and even surpassed what any of thought possible in that vast urban tract and through whatever means necessary, elect him President in 2008.
I'm talking about Rudolph Guiliani, an Italian from Brooklyn, and I can hardly believe that we have to wait three and half more years until he's the next President, along with Condi as his VP.

Sigh.

Until that time though, it's time for Karl Rove to get his head out of ass and for Dubya to forget about every appealing to the Left side of the aisle and focus on what we thought this Presidency was about: winning the war against the Islamofascists. I don't understand why nobody else has noticed that George's domestic policy successes came only when he was putting pressure on the enemy. Instead, we have come to this strange equilibrium of virtually inviting the Islamofascists into Iraq to do battle with them there instead of continuing to push the fight against them. Dubya still wants private social security accounts and genuine tax reform? He better get out there and starting kicking some serious ass, and the way that I see it, there's only two options remaining:

1. Cordon the borders of Syria and Iran off and begin a massive troop build-up on both sides. Let the Iranians and the Syrians make of it what they will but only say that the added troops are there to protect the territorial integrity of Iraq. Do we not have a shred of capacity for subterfuge and counterintelligence operations? Sheesh.
2. Bomb the hell out of Sryia and overthrow Assad's regime. Let the Iranians make of it what they will, especially since they'll realize....Israel now has a direct flight path to Iran. Hmmmm.

There are only three, no, four options remaining! The four options remaing to us are...(if you didn't get that...I don't know what to do say)

With Syria out of the way all of the sudden the shining light of truth will now be solidly fixed on the location that has spawned this evil: Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabit interlocutors know that they are not the true heirs of Islam and that if the rest of the Islamic world knew the full truth about their hedonistic activities, the sickness of their massive welfare state, and their inability to stem the flow of billions of dollar to the worldwide network of madrassas means that a realpolitik situation exists. A situation that must be exploited.
The Iranians believe they are the rightful heirs of the Islamic culture, fine whatever. They can believe that they are the heirs to the Zoroastrians for all I care. What I do care about is that the Iranians can potentially be turned into allies, especially given the unstable status of Pakistan and the fact that there will be a democratic Iraq sitting on Iran's borders. Removing the Syrians from the equation will only put the pressure directly on the Iranian government, which is caught in the middle of what they perceive as a lethal situation: they are surrounded by nuclear powers. Pakistan, a Sunni majority state, India, a secular though largely Hindu state, Russia, a secular but largely Christian state, and Iraq, a secular though currently under our protection state. Everywhere the Iranians leaders look, they see states with nuclear weapons. Well, why can't we have one? they whine. Boo hoo.
Big ideas people. You can't win if you don't play. We need to develop the ability to place human intelligence into every country and be able to direct covert activities that can change the tide from within. Even if a democratically elected government of Iran isn't the best of friends with everyone else, we might be able to offer them say, a nuclear security guarantee so long as they don't develop nuclear weapons. Nothing scares the hell out of non-nuclear armed states more than saber rattling from nuclear armed states, that is, unless they're backed up by the US. Look at the security relationship between the US and Japan. They make cheap consumer electronics and we protect them with nuclear weapons. Great isn't it?
Big ideas, I'll say it again. We need to see more than just the picture. We need to realize that there is a big picture. And most people just haven't even thought about it. They don't care. They're big idea is trying out one of Rachel Ray's new recipes. I swear to you that woman's smile is not natural. No one should be able to smile from one side of the face to the other and have it appear that her teeth stretch the same distance. It just freaks me out. And the nation loves her. Wow, I am so out of the loop.

we need big ideas and we need them fast...

Ultimately this is a really boring time to live in. I mean that. For the vast majority of the citizens of what remains of the West, while life may not be easy, it certainly is no longer a struggle. Instead of worrying about what we're going to have for dinner, we worry about what we shouldn't have dinner. Interesting turnabout there. Wasn't too long ago that most people worried about what would be dinner, not whether what they were eating was a nutritionally sound meal. What's next, the unbearable thought of life without Dr. Scholls? People standing in sovietesque lines to make sure they get the new Mach 5 from Gillette?
But of course, nothing much changes about nothing. And ultimately we're content with that, because so far what has only sort of kind of worked has sort of kind of worked and after all, that's better than most of human history when even the things that sort of kind of worked weren't really working at all, and if they were working, it was because you had fixed them, defended it from wandering barbarians or tribes or nature...because order had been brought from chaos.
Trouble with bringing order to chaos is that no matter how hard you try, the laws of thermodynamics will stop you. Every change affects another, and before you know it, you've upended the entire social order and now you can't even read the street signs in your hometown because they've been printed in Terroc, the new language of the continental empire which once was the western hemisphere. Stranger things have happened.
I must admit that I have personally always longed for an American empire. I remember being sorely disappointed that we didn't engage the Soviets after World War II, that MacArthur was pulled from combat by Truman, that Kennedy didn't just nuke the bastards into oblivion, and that Reagan didn't give ole Gorbie one right where it counted. So many missed opportunites. That we didn't simply make Mexico part of the United States during the Mexican-American war, that we never managed to peel off most of Canada, that the nation's the Caribbean aren't states, the central American states, the Phillipines, Japan, Germany, the list goes on and on. Of course, I can hear now the quotes that will be selected from this blog twenty years from now proving that I am militant fascist hellbent on world dominiation.
Quite the contrary, I'm merely hellbent on getting as many people to agree that the rule of law, the market economy and representative, limited, constitutional government is the only way to go. And if that means absorbing nations into the United States than so much the better--why, we have the only built-in mechanism for doing so of any nation; within the Constitution itself are instructions on how to add new states to the Union.
Instead, we limited ourselves to this little expanse of the Western hemisphere, one nation under Canada and above Mexico with that piece of Alaska and Hawaii and some other random places throughout the Pacific and Atlantic that are ours...but noooooooo....instead, we've got all this bullshit going on and no big ideas.
A few years ago I came up with the idea of Anti-Terrorist Treaty Organizations; ATTO's. I now think that's a mistake. While the threat of Islamofascists is immense, they are quickly being relegated to the ash heap of history, or at least, everyone who wants to fight us in open combat is. Meanwhile, the shadowy elements of the post-Jihad are beginning to come to light. And the light is not looking very pretty.

-A weakened and strategically impotent western continental europe and a resurgent, patriotic eastern europe find themselves at each other's throats concerning the fate of the EU and it's constitution--only Britains emerges unscathed and still a global power.
-Virtually every Sunni Muslim shamed into obseqious deferrence to the demographic reality concerning their religion: there are simply a lot more Shiites than Sunnies. That almost sounds like the ending to a real good insensitive ethnic joke. And of course, the bereaved will undoubtedly form a secret organization that future conspiracy theorists will ascribe all sorts of fantastic events to, such as the infamous Maltor-Maltor sighting in 2403 over the Rhein river valley. It's actually quite unimportant, since nobody knows yet what a Maltor-Maltor and those pesky little Germans certainly do still know how to yield firearms, but that's another story for another time
-did you know that China and Russia were performing joint military operations on the peninsula directly across from North Korea and the Chinese have constructed effective security perimeters around three of the four main routes into China from NK and that the Chinese also ejected all the civilians from the area....nope, neither did i, here's the link.
SUBSCRIPT: to the last point, dummy. oh, ah yes. North Korea is the perfect opportunity for what will indefinitely constitute the genuine "Axis", namely Russia, China, France and a host of their minions to enshrine "preemption" as a legitimate tool. After all, if Dubya actually gets serious and realizes that there's only way to go about this in the Middle East and he preempts in, say Syria, then FrancoSinoRusso Axis will really be put to shame. The Chinese want to prove that they are ready for world leadership; think of the deferential press coverage the Chinese would get concerning their humane treatment of North Korea's impoverished people, how there was no local "resistance" as their was in Iraq. It would be the ultimate apparent PR coup--it would only really look that way to the people of the MSM and their minions. And it would remove a thorn in the Chinese and Russians side, eliminate a dangerous maniac and simultaneously make them that much more capable of taking on another unstable regime and or carrying out extensive repression at home. Imagine then the magnamity of the FranceSinoRusso Axis when they are able to reunite North and South Korea and expel American forces from the oh so strategically important peninsula....
--Taiwan anyone? North Korea seems to be the perfect opportunity for China to practice staging a massive amount of troops and moving them in to possible combat. China hasn't tried anything of significant external military activity since the 1970's when they fought Vietnam and damn near fought the Soviet Union. If this actually transpires, then be very very aware that sooner than sooner, the PRC will invade the ROC. Say hello to the first major engagment of the post-Jihadi conflict.
--At that point the Jihadis become an unstable element. Loyal to neither side, interested only in seeing the two combatants injured beyond repair, they pursue a policy of all out attrition. Suicide bombings whenever and wherever possible under any circumstances, larger attacks when possible, but the desperate Sunnis will do whatever it takes to preserve their traditions and of course, their modern, politically shaded interpretations of Islam and the Koran, which of course allows them to indulge in all the excesses of the West without suffering the punishments incurred by regular Muslims...sounds like the Plenary Indulgence of Indulgences. Oh how I wish someone in the Muslim world would think of Martin Luther as his spirit guide. But, not too many Muslims probably know who Martin Luther was or that I would think he might be their spirit guide. Oh well, I could use a good ole fashioned primitive spirit guide. At least it would be physically embodied and maybe it'd be something ferocious and evocative, like a venemous coral snake or maybe just a wild boar; always been partial to bears myself. No matter!
-SIDE NOTE: when open conflict between the Anglosphere and FrancoSinoRusso Sphere begins, you better be damn sure that the Jihadis see the FSR as the one who have the potential to do real damage. Let them know that we won't divert resources to hunting them down unless they shift their attention to our enemies. We must be prepared for this possibility, not to negotiate, but to take advantage of the situation. We must turn our enemies against each other. We must study Bismarck. We must learn to use our advantages and turn our weaknesses into advantages. We must awaken from the myopia.
But who wants to pay attenion when, gosh, things are just fine the way they are?

what IS happening...?

The world is changing. I sound like the beginning of the Lord of the Rings movie. Let's try again. The world HAS changed and what we are witnessing is the near total and complete erasure of the order that we have comfortably known up until this point. Not much can be done to alter the path that we are on, and even worse, any serious incursions will only prove to make the transition more difficult. This is of course, making several assumptions:

1. The People's Republic of China will survive as one state.
2. India will choose to become a full partner with the United States, along with Japan, Britain and Australia (and a smattering of other smaller states)
3. The primary focus of the US foreign policy remains the Terror World.
4. The Democrats continue their descent towards becoming the 21st century Whigs.
5. The European Union will be unable to extricate itself from the mores of "democratic socialism" (plain old fashioned collectivism from my standpoint) and will indeed become Eurabia, with horrifying consequences for the region of the world that spawned the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions, and pretty much everything of consequence to Western civilization upon until the Founding.
6. The United States remains a single state (Mexifornia anyone?)
7. Africa remains mostly impoverished and incapable of functioning as nation-states can as well as most of South America (compared to what will be the new "West")
8. No WMD's are used on US soil for the indeterminate future.

The indeterminate future. What would you have said to me if I came to you in 1992, during the Golden Era of the brief post Cold War period, and said that in 2005 we would have destroyed the Taliban and Saddam's regime, occupied both nations and begun the process of rebuilding the infrastructure and building civil societies, begun the process of reordering our military bases away from old allies who are now perfectly capable of defending themselves, and that Fox News would have more viewers that CNN and MSNBC combined, that the blogosphere (the what you say? by this point you're exasperated) would have managed to swing the pendulum of power out of the hands of the MSM (the what? the MSM?). My point is that what in the hell is going to be going on in 2017? That's only 13 years from now--13 years ago I would have argued that we would be engaged in a brutally intense cold war with China and facing a massive militarization of the Straits with the eminent possibility of war between the US and China concerning Taiwan and China's desire to become the global hegemon, thus supplanting the US.
Instead China has become the country that puts all those worthless pieces of plastic together after everyone else has built the really complex parts and now they think that every other problem that they have will vanish, just as sson as they control the entire world market of worthless pieces of plastic. Sounds like Stalin in the 50's who saw that Western nations produced a lot of steel, so, the Soviet Union should also produce steel. The ends for authoritarians are always on a piece of paper; the ends for liberals (I should remind people that I refuse to concede ground to modern liberals on the meaning of this word; modern liberals are not liberals, they are authoritarian reactionaries who have interest only in their own power) are always in a person's mind. A person, an individual makes decisions and then has to live with them. An authoritarian makes decision and everyone else has to live with it.

The thought that permeates the left: Somewhere, someplace, someone is doing something that I think they shouldn't be doing and the only way to stop this is by forcing them to stop.

Instead of my scenario above, we are faced with the same China which has witnessed the marvel of the US military and knows that they are nowhere near ready to try anything, yet. But oh how they are planning. Planning, planning, planning. But it will get them nowhere. The history of China is replete with examples of extensive cycles of centralization and decentralization. The more power Beijing tries to accumulate, the more quickly it will determine it will cement it's own end. The more wealth that the enterprise free zones on the eastern coast accumulate, the more they will be resented by the nations more than 900 million peasants, who live in relative poverty and complete and total lack of choice about their lives. They are given the illusion of local government and little else.
Ever notice how there is never any news about China? About, anything about China. Ever. Can you think of a story about China that talks about a particular Chinese person doing anything? What technologies have the Chinese invented in the past hundred years that were crucial to the development of the information economy?

Back to the list. I believe it is highly unlikely that the PRC will not survive to 2017. Scratch number one.

this wooden horse of troy malarkey...

every day the Left wakes up, stretches, and goes to work at figuring out how best to go about filling up their own wooden animal and then trying to smuggle it into the heartland and saying, "AHA! Now we've got DUBYA and we got him good!"
And every day everybody watches the Left load up their wooden asse, and every day they watch them storm out, and every day everybody else pops their head up for a second, shakes their heads, and returns to the "business of the nation" as the Left used to love to put their political chicanery during the 90's.
and every day, the Left is unable to believe that no one else will join them in getting their wooden asse ready, after all, today is the day that they are going to force the President into submission. Today they will stop John Roberts. Today they will use Katrina as political cannon fodder. Today they will embarass the President with what should have been a nominally private note to Condi Rice. Every day is Today. Every single damn day the Left wakes up in what seems to be a permanent myopia with but one goal in mind: get George Bush.
It reminds me that silly movie with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. Each day she wakes up, unable to remember the events of the previous day. Her short term memory has been destroyed, and thus can remember everything that happened to up until the point at which her ability to store short term memories is wiped out. Something similar has happened to the Left in recent years; for them, the moment at which their memories stop working is the day the Supreme Court stopped Florida from counting chads, dimples and recounts from previous counts. For them, the issue of what the law was concerning the elections are irrelevant; the Court took the election away from Al Gore and gave it to this interloper, this smug, arrogant, stupid yet simultaneously briliant conspirator who has managed to use the war on terror as an excuse to expand his oil industry associates wallets. The contradictions throughout the Left's worldview are almost to incongruent to believe, and thus, it's not even important to talk about what they believe or how they got there. Their beliefs are helping them in any event, they're only forcing to go through this daily repetition of always looking for that single shred of evidence, that one memo, that one leak, that one natural catastrophe, that one moment when somebody, somewhere in America is not protected by the all-encompassing arms of the government. They want George Bush to be their father and at the same time they want to behave just teenagers, never listening, always running about trying to get one up on the old man. It's beyond absurd, it's psychotic.
I know from experience what sheer hatred of a political opponent can bring. When I was but 12 I became engrossed with the fatal reality that Bill Clinton, whom I had figured out was nothing more than a womanizer and political opportunist and that he would be President for at least four more years. But hating Clinton never got me anywhere with anyone, especially myself; it only made me want to go out and espouse a positive agenda of change cemented in my belief in the rule of law, the market economy, and representative, federal, constitutional government. The scandals, the mismanagement of international relations, the slippery slope of perjury being acceptable, the selling of America technologies for campaign cash, the administrations possession of thousands of FBI files on political opponents, Whitewater, Vince Foster, Ron Brown, Waco, and on and on and on and on...that wasn't the point. Really and truly, America has survived far worse than eight years of El Bubba hanging out in the White House having parties. I can effectively argue that Bill Clinton helped eviscerate more of the Democratic Party than the Right could ever have hoped to do, and did so in a fashion that allowed the Democrats to believe that they were still in it, even though they weren't at all. Hating Bill Clinton taught me how to like Bill Clinton, how to get past his behavior, his ethical shortcomings, how to see through him a vehicle for change. After all, the only two of Clinton's major legislative initiatives to ever become law that actually mattered were conservative ideas: NAFTA and welfare reform. And even if he did nothing else, which isn't true, that would be enough for me. Two victories, lets gets some more.
But the Left cannot ever like George Bush, and they never will, and thus, because the Democrats have eschewed the role of the loyal opposition, they will likely continue to build their giant wooden asse every day, not sure why everyone else isn't participating.

the summer has ended...

it has been since mid-april that i posted and i did so for a few reasons:
1) my day job picked up outrageously and up until I went on vacation last month I was worked pretty much 60-90 hour weeks including the band from mid April until last month
2) everybody has something to say about everything. and everything is an epochal moment. and suddenly this is the most destructive thing we've ever witnessed. the way people run their mouths (including myself) makes me want to go to wal-mart and order fifty millions rolls of duct-tape and begin walking the nation with but one mission: to stop this wooden horse of troy malarkey. i'll get back to that allusion in a minute.
3) because everybody is talking, few people are genuinely listening. who needs to listen when so much can be said about nothing? and by nothing i mean the political circus, no, worse than a circus, the politcal rave that has sprung forth like the waters of the Gulf across the levees in NuOhlans, of the past five or so months since I last posted. What has really happened? Can anybody really remember the minute to minute, blow by blow accounting on the major news networks, the outrages and indignations, the interviews and crosstalk between the talking heads, and more importantly, does any of that matter? What did people do before society possessed a large, and largely segregated population of people whose sole job was to run around with cameras and film people and ask silly questions? How on earth did they fill up all twenty four hours of the day...how could they have possibly arrived at a conclusion about anything since they didn't know anything to begin with? For that matter, can anybody remember what was being said across the great bloviated blogosphere about, say Terry Schiavo, and how that was going to bring down Dubya?
4) the bloviation of the blogosphere continues. as a matter of fact, it's kind of bovine in it's bloviation. while i marvel at the variety and the vast amount of raw ability that the blogosphere brings to bear, it's important to bear in mind that all of these talents existed before the sphere. it's almost better to think of the blogosphere as spherical rather than something merely two-dimensional, which is the only representation we get physically. but really, the sphere is merely the abstraction of the physical world--it is every blogger's transcendental existence. it is the technological equivalent of the metaphysical, because here, we, bloggers that is, are able to if we wanted to, to record every waking thought, every idea, every nuance, every transgression, everything if we wanted to and for the first time in human history anyone with an internet connection can read your experience, your point of view, your way of looking at things, and say, to themselves, well golly gee, i remember reading that blog once and now i can't remember what he said. while hugh hewitt may disagree, which is fine, but the information revolution has not yet produced a reformation--at best, we're still writing our theses to post on the doors of the MSM and other detritus of industrial and preindustrial and primitive civilizations that still haunt the planet. there is now more information on the internet than is contained in the entire library of congress and that amount of information will only continue as we add to our already sizeable collection of literally billions upon billions of web pages--some of them containing very useful information, but for the most part, what we have collectively done is equivalent to several hundred million people fingerpaint and then make several billions photocopies and mail them to everyone a hundred times over. The sheer magnitude of information that exists is enough to make one's head spin if you really think about it, and what has it wrought? For the right side of the sphere, it has allowed for a healthy discussion of ideas and an honorable debate on just about everything; for the left side of the sphere, it has made them more conscious that somewhere, someplace, someone is doing something that they don't approve of and by somebody who they generally don't believe in, something has to be done about it, usually the government, which of course, they have very little say in right now and will probably only have less in the foreseeable future (we hope). For the people who have no interest in politics as a pasttime, the two sides of the sphere are mutually exclusive. Caricatures are the primary means of identifying the various poles and little thought is given to the idea that either side is right or wrong; to those who have no interest in the political process, both sides are ultimately only interested in what benefits them--the idea that a person, a political person whether pundit or elected official, might actually have a real idealogical position and actually hold firm to it is completely implausible, because they themselves have no understanding of history, philosophy, political science, economics, the concepts of the rule of law and marginalism and most important of all: they have no interest in educating themselves. For them, the past five months of hyperpartisan activity by the Left hasn't happened, nor will it be remembered, for them, this has been a really nice summer man. Sure, gas prices were high, but fuck it.
This is a point that nearly everyone across the entire spectrum of the sphere completely neglects to mention: what about the people who just don't give one rats ass about the trade deficit, right to die or right to choose, same sex marriage, budget negotiations, the Supreme Court vacancies, etc., etc., ad nauseum blah blah blah. I remember Nat Hentoff writing most frequently about this but only to point how uninvolved our civilization really is. A population of nearly 300 million, and a 120 million votes cast for President. What percentage of our population is underage? hmmmmmmm....not 180 million I can tell you that much. For those people, there is no history, there was never a past and there will not be a future: there is only now and the question that ranges on their minds is: what the fuck are we gonna do tonight, man? Generally phrased in that sort of language too, and while I am generally far more comfortable infusing my speech with colorful metaphors than most people, after a while, if used every other word, loses its potency and becomes nothing more than a slightly glorified modifier, a word that holds a special place in everyone's hearts for more than one reason alone. Now, strange as it is going to sound, I much prefer that they remain out of the loop for the sole fact that there are enough people out there running their mouths and their keyboards who honestly think that they know something when in fact they are only reporting about how the feel about some particular issue or another. With the left, it's always, well, I feel so, terrible about those poor people (and by poor we mean their socioeconomic status of course, not, those poor, poor people, you know the difference) and I want to help them. And of course, because they generally have feelings about how other people should live their lives and not about their own they usually tend to be interested in only effecting that change among people who are different or believe in different things from them. How else can one explain, that very nearly spontaneously, the urban areas of the country have become this last bastion of feelers, people who genuinely believe that everyone who doesn't live in the city is a Neanderthal. In Atlanta, people call it OTP. Outside the Perimeter. Got invited to a "gathering" of apparently people who know hundreds of other people and call them their "friends" at a bar ITP (inside the perimeter). Talking about this and that with one the girls who invited myself and Brett (she saw us at a show) asked again, where did we live? And the immediate response, "Wow, you guys are so OTP."
I couldn't help but be astonished at her complete and total assumption of superiority for having chosen to live inside the city. I can't stand American cities, terrible to drive in, horrible traffic, (this seperate from the terrible to drive in--all those damn untimed traffice lights!), significantly higher crime rates than the suburbs, and of course, all those make me feel better about everyone else regulations that just drive me absolutely spare.
More to come

Religious and Secular America

The more that I think about the changes that have been happening across America, the more the little electoral map keeps popping into my head. Especially the one that has the counties that each candidate won--I know that everyone has seen the map, and that everyone pretty much understands that for the most part, rural, sub and exurban areas voted for Bush, while the urban areas pretty much voted for Kerry. This leads us to a conclusion that is not easily avoided: there are for all intensive purposes, two very different Americas in existence right now. These two different nations are as different as the United States is from Mexico or Canada and just as real. If we think of them as any less than as distinct, separate nations we are only deceiving ourselves into pretending that Blue America still thinks of themselves as Americans, or that they would be proud to call America home. This is also just as true for Red State America; how many Red State parents could imagine not having their four children, suburban home with two car garage and two gas guzzling SUV's in the driveway and their Sunday, Wednesday and only God knows how many other nights they spend at their church or school, "involved in the community." As a member of the Red state, Republican, conservative, right wing or whatever you want to call it, I am interested in discovering what it is to be a member of the Blue state, Democratic, liberal, socialist, marxist, post-modern, post-colonial, post-thought coalition. What is it to be someone who still has their Kerry/Edwards, although more often than not, I usually only see the Kerry bumper stickers, the ones that came out before Kerry had picked a VP. I always try to drive up and stare intimidatingly at these people. I magnanimously removed my Bush/Cheney bumper sticker the day after the election--why taunt these poor souls who are unable to stomach the thought that somewhere, someplace, a tree is being cut down? I almost thought about putting a helpful bumper sticker up, something along these lines:

Election results got you down? Feeling nauseous at the words Fox News? Does the letter W make you want to run right down to the yoga center and do some stretching?
Then why don't you just the fudge out...

Then again, I thought, probably not a good idea to ask them to leave.
Then again, I thought, why not? What essential services and products does blue-state America provide? Any? Let's see, I don't watch television, so that one is off the list. I don't really go to the movies anymore, and if I do, I try really hard only to see movies that I have to see, like Star Wars or Star Trek. Occassionally I'll go, but otherwise, why bother? Let's see, let's see...I consume a lot of written leftist media, but only to maintain my fluency in their chosen dialect, let's call it, pretentious Newspeak, or the language of critical theory. Tish, pishaw and nonsense. But I don't pay for any of that. I'd read the NYT everyday if I didn't have to register. As a matter of fact there are plenty of liberal newspapers that I would every day if I didn't have to register, and the times that I do register I register as Edith Wharton, female aged 108 living in Brooklyn. Or William Henry Harrison aged 119. I bet if the NYT or any other website that required people to check they would find out that there were an awful lot of names and ages and demographic distributions that just didn't make much sense. Most conservative papers don't require you to register. Very interesting.
More to come. Time for bed.

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.