There is a curious thing about learning how to listen. You begin to forget that you, too, have a voice. You begin to lose the need, the almost daily need to vocalize what you think and instead thinkg about what you think. And across what constitutes the vast bloated, bloviating sphere of the American intelligentsia, a swath of mandibular excrement emanates from the newspapers, the blogs, the magazines, the ezines, the people who pay for their own personal commercials at two in the morning, every poster on every BBS board, everybody who is saying, writing, promoting basically any and everything. But who is listening to all of this? Who is listening and more importantly, who is absorbing all of this, and what impact does any of it have?
And thus, when you make a conscious effort to not say anything about what's happening in the world, about what's happening in the part of the world that only reacts to what's happening in the world, you begin to realize that what you have to say about anything doesn't really matter. In fact, you notice, that the more people there talking about any one thing, the less is matters. And then you notice that perhaps never before have so many voices had so little to say all at once. That never before have so many been people been empowered with technology and had no real use for it. That never before have so many people had the opportunity to improve themselves, to improve their awareness, to improve their knowledge of this life and so few of them, across the breadth and depth of the political spectrum, have taken advantage of it.
I've said it just now and I'll probably say it again, but never before have so many had so little to say about the massive complexity that is this little planet, and so little of consequence. Most of what qualifies as commentary on the left is as tired as it is noxious. Much of what qualifies as commentary on the right is as empty as it is paranoid. Nobody who is "qualified" to speak about what passes for American civilization these days really has any idea what the "ordinary" American life is. The party of the common man is the party of the limoliberal and the party of federalism is the party of the countryclub "mexicans take care of the fairways" republicans. It ought not be a secret that I consider the fact that structure of the major parties and the structure of the Communist Parties of the former eastern bloc are remarkably similar. It ought also not be a secret that at this point, I consider serious reform to be impossible. If six years of a Republican President and a Republican Congress, and a Republican appointed Supreme Court (only two of the sitting justices were appointed by a Democrat) can't bring about at least a flatter tax system, a reduction in the overall size of government, partial, even just partial privitization of social security/medicare/medicaid, or outright victories in Afghanistan or Iraq (thus seriously alienating Jacksonians of all stripes), and at least beginning the long process of undoing the welfare state, with none of this having happened at all, in the least, in the past six years....let's just say it ought to be obvious to anyone watching that the American system of government has become paralyzed, worse, unable to use any of the powers granted to it to any effect. The Left moans and complains about the President being essentially a fascist precursor or a fascist himself, yet what actual power does the President have over you? Can the President even order the border closed? Can the President order what dictators and tyrants alike have had the power to do, protect the territorial and demographic integrity of their nations? Can the President do that? If not, then how much power does the President actually have?
And what about all those people out there who aren't talking and they aren't listening...they aren't even aware that there is a, discussion, no, a shouting competition taking place. Or, worse, they could simply be talking, exalting their status online on such fetid, purile nonsense like myspace or friendster where people show off how many "friends" they have and list all of their daily interests in a tiny side bar, which is of course, where interests truly belong. And then they think that this, like, so normal, this is what everybody has always done...oh my GAWD aren't we just so important.
I feel sick to my stomach. I feel completely unable to make any sense other than this: something has got to give. And sooner, rather than later. Something, because this False War that we've been engaged in since 9/11/01, much like the False War of September 1939 through 1940, cannot continue indefinitely. I know this sounds ridiculous to say, but the longer we go without an attack, the sooner we are to the next one, which will undoubtedly be a much larger, more coordinated strike against multiple targets.
I want everyone, and I mean everyone, all the talking heads, all the posting fools, all you Instapundit wannabees and Katie Courics and everybody, I want everybody to just shut up. Be quiet, sit down and listen to yourself for a while, maybe a whole day, say nothing, turn your cell phone off and your house phone and the computer and the tv and everything and just sit, drink some tea, collect your thoughts, find your thoughts, and then, maybe when you've had a while to think about what you've been saying everyone might pull their heads of out their collective asses and we can get some things done. Until then, we continue at roughly one half impulse...ahead full Mr. Sulu.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Sunday, February 26, 2006
i can say god but god is but a word...
Oh if only Frank Herbert had been right about Islam and Buddhism and the Sufis. In the Dune universe, while the eventual inheritors of the ZenSunni credo, "I can say god but god is but a word" are in fact still interested in complete and total domination, for the first ten thousand years or so, the ZenSunnis are known only as the "cowards who ran from the machines" (of course, I suppose this is really Brian Herbert's universe, but what the hell). If only somewhere in the wilds of the past Buddhism could have had a calming, Zen effect upon Islam's unwielding desire to make everyone part either the umma or the dhimmi. And my ass doesn't bow before anyone, so the buck pretty much stops right there. Instead, we're faced with the apparently unending possibility, no scratch that, some of us have become aware of the threat posed to the inherited cultural traditions of the West is the same threat that Sultan Suleiman posed when he stood at the gates of Vienna. A threat that can only be said to have been saved by an act of God, for had the mud not forced him to leave behind his heavy cannon, we wouldn't even be worried about any of this. History gave us a second chance then, and history is not often inclined to do so. Civilizations die, and ours is imperiled beyond belief.
Step back, take a breath. Breathing is the only autonomic function in our bodies that we can directly regulate and influence; there are two sets of nerves that control the regulation of our breathing. Go ahead take a breath. Now forget about it. Your body will keep breathing of its' own accord, unwilling to let you just lapse into unconsciousness from lack of oxygen. The West, scratch that, because there is no more West. The West's dead Zed. All that remains are pockets, our own oil spots, just waiting to be added to the growing area that is the umma. Paris is virtually surrounded by little Fallujah's, every major Germany city has it's own Turkville, the Netherlands, well, we don't have to go down the list, do we? What kind of people riot and kill in the name of a cartoon? What kind of people believe that the public and the private sphere are one in the same, that men may have the kind of judgment and sway that we leave to the true higher authorities, whomever they may be. One of my fundamental precepts is that anyone who says that they have knowledge of God is lying, flat out lying. It doesn't matter to me whether its' Ghandi or Mother Teresa of John Paul or Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or any Reverend, Minister, Iman, Priest, Talmudic scholar, whatever. Yet here we see evidence that more than one billion people believe that their imans know precisely what the Prophet and Allah want and that they are willing to attack foreign embassies and kill each other accidentally and anyone else willfully.
People ask where are the voices of Muslim discontent? Where are the moderates? What is a moderate Muslim? Can there be any moderation when the word Islam means submission? Can there be any moderation when the Koran is the word of God breathed directly through his messneger, Mohammad? Can any Muslim in the world actually separate their "church" from their "state" or are ultimately going to be faced with the application of sharia law throughout the entirety of the Muslim world, a theocratic society, and more importantly, a theocracy that is of the people, by the people and for the people, people who are Muslims. For Muslims, the freedom to choose is itself the evil--the evil that one practices, that is forgiveable, the freedom to choose, the freedom that we don't even think about anymore when we live our lives according to our interests, that is what the Muslim world abhors. They don't want to choose, they're not interested in personal choices for themselves. They have submitted. There will is the will of Allah. Allah Akbar! God is truly great, but who are we to know God? Bin Laden and his cohorts believe that they are freedom fighters, that they are not only fighting a strategic war to undermine our power, but they are fighting to free the Muslim peoples of the world so that they can live, freely, having submitted to Allah in heaven and the iman of Earth. For them, there is state and no individual, there is only the umma, and Allah gave Mohammad the word and Mohammad gave Islam its fundamental form of government to this day: theocracy.
How does one battle a theocracy? More importantly, when do we recognize that Huntington was not only right, but that he had no idea just how right he was? When? After Hitler invaded Poland in August, the elites began to call World War II, the "false war". England and France had both declared war on Germany, yet the Wehrmacht and the divisions of Panzers and Tigers sat still, the Maginot line untouched, Britain's fleet unattacked. A few skirmishes here and there, but nothing sizeable. Nothing one would call World War II. We have been engaged in a longer version of the false war since September 11, 2001 and something's gotta give. Civilizational tensions are just like the fault lines of the continents: convergence zones are under tremendous pressure, and when the plates slip, the resulting energy does things like shake the planet of it's axis and alter our orbit. The friction between the umma, the community of Muslims who have submitted their personal autonomy for a religion that undermines their very humanity by making women second class citizens, by making choice a word that doesn't exist, for choice is to sin as the West is to choice--they see our choice, our freedom to choose and they resent it. They hate that we have the freedom to choose whatever we want, at the same time their religion tells them that they ought to see themselves as above that freedom, that freedom is a distraction from the pursuit of that which I'm telling is more important: Allah. Submit and all your troubles will just fade away. Submit you fools and we won't have to cut off your head. Submit infidel while there is still time.
But we still haven't answered the question: how we do we fight a religiously oriented society that has no other culture. Sure, there are groups of people who have withstood the harsher interpretations of Islam, the Kurds, for the most part the Turks, but these are people for whom Islam was merely the next religion of the newest conquerors. The fact that the next conquerors converted to Islam is telling though...Islam obscures all other aspects of culture. It supplants culture just as the federal government in the United States has supplanted the father in the black community. And look what that has wrought: the destruction of the black family, the ghettoization of black culture, the radicalization of hip-hop (Kanye West) and people who think they are entitled to something. Just like Islam. Muslims believe that they are entitled to what the West has to offer but that they don't have also accept modernity's values: the rule of law, sexual equality, market economies, separation of church and state, constitutional limited governments--oh no, they can enjoy KFC and Pizza Hut but not the benefits of the Enlightenment.
There is only way to fight a theocracy: destroy the theocracy, and to do so, we must begin the long demographic fight of conversion. Although I myself am not a practioner of religion, one must accept that religion is a potent political force, witness the reaction of both the cartoons and the Port deal: faith is a huge motivator. And while I may disagree with the events of Christianity, the teachings of Christ, the Golden Rule, the Beautitudes, the desire to help one another, those are ethical morays that I can agree to participate in because they have a deeper truth beyond whether or not Jesus was the son of God. I believe that to say God is to say but a word and what is word? Certainly it wouldn't help if our government was more ferverntly supportive of Christian missionaries in the Muslim world, forcing governments such as Saudi Arabia to allow Christianity to be practiced there, realizing along the way that Islam is America's fastest growing religion. It's either that or convince the Sunnis and Shiites to become Sufis, because nobody has ever heard of Sufi terrorist, they'd rather have you over for tea and hashish then a fight against the West.
And if that doesn't work, then the only option that remains is to defeat them, defeat them militarily, defeat them politically, defeat them humanitarianly, socially, and of course, religiously.
Step back, take a breath. Breathing is the only autonomic function in our bodies that we can directly regulate and influence; there are two sets of nerves that control the regulation of our breathing. Go ahead take a breath. Now forget about it. Your body will keep breathing of its' own accord, unwilling to let you just lapse into unconsciousness from lack of oxygen. The West, scratch that, because there is no more West. The West's dead Zed. All that remains are pockets, our own oil spots, just waiting to be added to the growing area that is the umma. Paris is virtually surrounded by little Fallujah's, every major Germany city has it's own Turkville, the Netherlands, well, we don't have to go down the list, do we? What kind of people riot and kill in the name of a cartoon? What kind of people believe that the public and the private sphere are one in the same, that men may have the kind of judgment and sway that we leave to the true higher authorities, whomever they may be. One of my fundamental precepts is that anyone who says that they have knowledge of God is lying, flat out lying. It doesn't matter to me whether its' Ghandi or Mother Teresa of John Paul or Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or any Reverend, Minister, Iman, Priest, Talmudic scholar, whatever. Yet here we see evidence that more than one billion people believe that their imans know precisely what the Prophet and Allah want and that they are willing to attack foreign embassies and kill each other accidentally and anyone else willfully.
People ask where are the voices of Muslim discontent? Where are the moderates? What is a moderate Muslim? Can there be any moderation when the word Islam means submission? Can there be any moderation when the Koran is the word of God breathed directly through his messneger, Mohammad? Can any Muslim in the world actually separate their "church" from their "state" or are ultimately going to be faced with the application of sharia law throughout the entirety of the Muslim world, a theocratic society, and more importantly, a theocracy that is of the people, by the people and for the people, people who are Muslims. For Muslims, the freedom to choose is itself the evil--the evil that one practices, that is forgiveable, the freedom to choose, the freedom that we don't even think about anymore when we live our lives according to our interests, that is what the Muslim world abhors. They don't want to choose, they're not interested in personal choices for themselves. They have submitted. There will is the will of Allah. Allah Akbar! God is truly great, but who are we to know God? Bin Laden and his cohorts believe that they are freedom fighters, that they are not only fighting a strategic war to undermine our power, but they are fighting to free the Muslim peoples of the world so that they can live, freely, having submitted to Allah in heaven and the iman of Earth. For them, there is state and no individual, there is only the umma, and Allah gave Mohammad the word and Mohammad gave Islam its fundamental form of government to this day: theocracy.
How does one battle a theocracy? More importantly, when do we recognize that Huntington was not only right, but that he had no idea just how right he was? When? After Hitler invaded Poland in August, the elites began to call World War II, the "false war". England and France had both declared war on Germany, yet the Wehrmacht and the divisions of Panzers and Tigers sat still, the Maginot line untouched, Britain's fleet unattacked. A few skirmishes here and there, but nothing sizeable. Nothing one would call World War II. We have been engaged in a longer version of the false war since September 11, 2001 and something's gotta give. Civilizational tensions are just like the fault lines of the continents: convergence zones are under tremendous pressure, and when the plates slip, the resulting energy does things like shake the planet of it's axis and alter our orbit. The friction between the umma, the community of Muslims who have submitted their personal autonomy for a religion that undermines their very humanity by making women second class citizens, by making choice a word that doesn't exist, for choice is to sin as the West is to choice--they see our choice, our freedom to choose and they resent it. They hate that we have the freedom to choose whatever we want, at the same time their religion tells them that they ought to see themselves as above that freedom, that freedom is a distraction from the pursuit of that which I'm telling is more important: Allah. Submit and all your troubles will just fade away. Submit you fools and we won't have to cut off your head. Submit infidel while there is still time.
But we still haven't answered the question: how we do we fight a religiously oriented society that has no other culture. Sure, there are groups of people who have withstood the harsher interpretations of Islam, the Kurds, for the most part the Turks, but these are people for whom Islam was merely the next religion of the newest conquerors. The fact that the next conquerors converted to Islam is telling though...Islam obscures all other aspects of culture. It supplants culture just as the federal government in the United States has supplanted the father in the black community. And look what that has wrought: the destruction of the black family, the ghettoization of black culture, the radicalization of hip-hop (Kanye West) and people who think they are entitled to something. Just like Islam. Muslims believe that they are entitled to what the West has to offer but that they don't have also accept modernity's values: the rule of law, sexual equality, market economies, separation of church and state, constitutional limited governments--oh no, they can enjoy KFC and Pizza Hut but not the benefits of the Enlightenment.
There is only way to fight a theocracy: destroy the theocracy, and to do so, we must begin the long demographic fight of conversion. Although I myself am not a practioner of religion, one must accept that religion is a potent political force, witness the reaction of both the cartoons and the Port deal: faith is a huge motivator. And while I may disagree with the events of Christianity, the teachings of Christ, the Golden Rule, the Beautitudes, the desire to help one another, those are ethical morays that I can agree to participate in because they have a deeper truth beyond whether or not Jesus was the son of God. I believe that to say God is to say but a word and what is word? Certainly it wouldn't help if our government was more ferverntly supportive of Christian missionaries in the Muslim world, forcing governments such as Saudi Arabia to allow Christianity to be practiced there, realizing along the way that Islam is America's fastest growing religion. It's either that or convince the Sunnis and Shiites to become Sufis, because nobody has ever heard of Sufi terrorist, they'd rather have you over for tea and hashish then a fight against the West.
And if that doesn't work, then the only option that remains is to defeat them, defeat them militarily, defeat them politically, defeat them humanitarianly, socially, and of course, religiously.
Monday, January 16, 2006
we only swim in the current..
Something from the Reimagined Battlestar Galactica, which totally kicks ass. And I'm totally in love with the entire idea of the series because it challenges all of my conventional, yes my conventional notions about science fiction. For me, Star Trek was once the opiate of sci-fi. But now, after having probably absorbed more Trek than is healthy for the average individual, and after having watched Trekkies and Trekkies 2, I have concluded that ultimately, no matter the popularity of Trek and the immense passion for which Trekkies and Trekkers have for the ideals of the Federation, I have concluded, that really, Star Trek sucks.
It sucks because all of the characters aren't people that you and I can relate with. They aren't colleagues who have that annoying habit of smacking their gum while they talk to you, or tapping their pens against their noses, or aren't crunching down a bag of cheese doodles every ten minutes, or whatever; in other words they aren't like anyone I know. For that matter, knowing what I know about people living three hundred years ago, they aren't all that dissimilar from you or I. Edmund Burke or Roger Bacon or John Locke or even Newton, despite all of his "issues" (most of which indicate that Newton was what we consider autistic). Even if every bit of the possibilities promised by the Singularity comes true (if you haven't been paying attention to the Sphere lately, then you'll know there's a rather torried undercurrent of it's own going on in which the theists are ridiculing the Singularitarians, calling the Singularity "rapture of the nerds"; it's pretty funny) then we will still have human problems that we have today in three hundred years. It's very likely that the Singularitarians alive today will be among those still having those problems three hundred years from now. Just because we can process information faster doesn't mean that we won't still have disagreements, moral qualms, ethical considerations, and the like, it just means that we'll have them faster, and with improved storage capacity, we will be able to reach faster conclusions, because we'll be able to play upon our interior mental landscape the exact memory that we recorded that particular day of that particular event and compare it to the one we are currently experiencing.
Again, we only swim in the current. Most of the time we are unaware that we part of the stream, that all that we are emanates from it and without the stream we are nothing. What fascinates me right now is the wholeness of things. There is no keyboard. There is only this imagined tactile space upon which I communicate my thoughts to you. I forget about the keyboard--I am only the words that are now on the screen and they are coming to you as fast as I can type them. Imagine how many words I could produce for you if all I had to do was will my mind to type--what thoughts, experiences, novels, music, what could I do if I had the ability to transcribe mind to matter immediately. If reality is truly only the intersection of my consciousness and extrusions from the substrate, the implicate matter of the universe, then there is nothing that is not part of the entirety. In other words, the separateness, the divisive need to categorize, label, name, analyze independently, the entire way that our minds have been trained to deal with "reality" only exacerbates the experience that most of feel that we somehow alone, that regardless of ones ontological and tautological views of the universe, we are ultimately limited by the reality that to truly experience God is an impossibility. To know infinity, to stare back at it and still not realize, really realize how truly tiny we are. How insignificant. How more likes electrons we are than thinking individuals and how little protection we have against the universe. How easy it would be for one really dedicated group of individuals to wipe out most of the human race. And how lackadaisical we all are, as the Left rants and raves about the next wooden horse that they have rolled into the square, this time the NSA "scandal." I don't think there's a Leftist alive today who would be able to relate to Bismarck or Metternich or even Truman--Democrats don't have strategy, they have strategery, and again it's a shame, because no amount of infighting within the Gop will do what a disciplined opposition party could do in terms of forcing the Gored on Porkers to come to terms with the fact that there are right now a substantial number of people within the conservative movement who aren't quite sure yet what we are going to do in 2006.
My feet are freezing. Of course I'm not wearing any socks, but Socrates used to stand in the snow barefoot. I'm going to go eat some dinner. Another moment in the current, but it's only carrying me forward. I want to be able to stand on the shore and watch the current move.
It sucks because all of the characters aren't people that you and I can relate with. They aren't colleagues who have that annoying habit of smacking their gum while they talk to you, or tapping their pens against their noses, or aren't crunching down a bag of cheese doodles every ten minutes, or whatever; in other words they aren't like anyone I know. For that matter, knowing what I know about people living three hundred years ago, they aren't all that dissimilar from you or I. Edmund Burke or Roger Bacon or John Locke or even Newton, despite all of his "issues" (most of which indicate that Newton was what we consider autistic). Even if every bit of the possibilities promised by the Singularity comes true (if you haven't been paying attention to the Sphere lately, then you'll know there's a rather torried undercurrent of it's own going on in which the theists are ridiculing the Singularitarians, calling the Singularity "rapture of the nerds"; it's pretty funny) then we will still have human problems that we have today in three hundred years. It's very likely that the Singularitarians alive today will be among those still having those problems three hundred years from now. Just because we can process information faster doesn't mean that we won't still have disagreements, moral qualms, ethical considerations, and the like, it just means that we'll have them faster, and with improved storage capacity, we will be able to reach faster conclusions, because we'll be able to play upon our interior mental landscape the exact memory that we recorded that particular day of that particular event and compare it to the one we are currently experiencing.
Again, we only swim in the current. Most of the time we are unaware that we part of the stream, that all that we are emanates from it and without the stream we are nothing. What fascinates me right now is the wholeness of things. There is no keyboard. There is only this imagined tactile space upon which I communicate my thoughts to you. I forget about the keyboard--I am only the words that are now on the screen and they are coming to you as fast as I can type them. Imagine how many words I could produce for you if all I had to do was will my mind to type--what thoughts, experiences, novels, music, what could I do if I had the ability to transcribe mind to matter immediately. If reality is truly only the intersection of my consciousness and extrusions from the substrate, the implicate matter of the universe, then there is nothing that is not part of the entirety. In other words, the separateness, the divisive need to categorize, label, name, analyze independently, the entire way that our minds have been trained to deal with "reality" only exacerbates the experience that most of feel that we somehow alone, that regardless of ones ontological and tautological views of the universe, we are ultimately limited by the reality that to truly experience God is an impossibility. To know infinity, to stare back at it and still not realize, really realize how truly tiny we are. How insignificant. How more likes electrons we are than thinking individuals and how little protection we have against the universe. How easy it would be for one really dedicated group of individuals to wipe out most of the human race. And how lackadaisical we all are, as the Left rants and raves about the next wooden horse that they have rolled into the square, this time the NSA "scandal." I don't think there's a Leftist alive today who would be able to relate to Bismarck or Metternich or even Truman--Democrats don't have strategy, they have strategery, and again it's a shame, because no amount of infighting within the Gop will do what a disciplined opposition party could do in terms of forcing the Gored on Porkers to come to terms with the fact that there are right now a substantial number of people within the conservative movement who aren't quite sure yet what we are going to do in 2006.
My feet are freezing. Of course I'm not wearing any socks, but Socrates used to stand in the snow barefoot. I'm going to go eat some dinner. Another moment in the current, but it's only carrying me forward. I want to be able to stand on the shore and watch the current move.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Strategic Vision, or, how to pull our collective heads out of our, you know what
There are too many currents in mind to put into words at the present time distinctly, succinctly, and directly. This will be a wandering topic that has roots in many different avenues of the human enterprise. The very nature of what concerns me is ultimately one thing: the survival of the Western world as the dominant force in the upcoming century and the preservation of our traditions, culture, and of course, the holy trinity of civil society, the rule of law, the market economy, and limited, constitutional, federal, representative government. The changes that are abreast will make this century the critical century for quite possibly the very future of mankind, and or at least allow us to begin colonization before anyone else. Yes, that's correct, space colonization.
So many people scoff at the future that is inevitable--there are simply too many resources, too many places to go and see first hand. If you haven't ever perused the websites of the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter for several years, or the Cassini craft that is currently orbiting Saturn, or the massive amount of imagery that the Mars rovers have returned in their trek across Mars, you really should, because they are spectacular. Who doesn't want to go and see those places, to examine the geology and possible biology of those planets? Or more importantly, who doesn't see dollars to be earned. I pointed out yonks ago that Ceres, an asteroid that orbits just outside of Mars is 80% ice water. That means it contains more freshwater than the entire Earth does!!! And we're worried about depleting resources. But beyond that, the advances that WILL happen in molecular nanotechnolgy, biotechnology, and robotics over the next twenty years will make the future a great deal more dangerous than it is even right now, especially as the forces that are at work in the world right now coalesce. And that's really what this post is about: our leaders, our pundits, our everybody pretty much doesn't seem to be aware of the undercurrents that are happening throughout the world. There are several things that I always take note of when I read the news:
1. There is rarely, and I mean rarely any news reported out of China, and I am aware of the recent reports of massive pollution and contamination of water supplies there. But that was the first report of any significance that had been pried out of China since a reported for the Voice of America, I believe, managed to get video out of Chinese villagers and police forces engaged in, well, the cops were trying to put down a protest and the protesters didn't like it too much.
2. There is rarely, and I mean rarely any news still to this day reported out of Russia. You have to go and look for news about Russia. You just don't find it on any common website that is an American one. Instead there's a hodgepodge. You can go to Pravda via Drudge, but their translators are terrible and the stories read like old Soviet press releases. Yuck.
3. There is rarely, and I mean rarely any news reported out of Iran...
Do you see a trend here? The Western nations on the other hand, all have plenty of information coming out of them, for free. Information that provides all those other nations that don't have information coming out of them with all the knowledge that they need to figure out just how effective their current strategies may or may not be. In other words, we are providing a ready made and free propaganda machine to the enemy, and therein lies the problem. We aren't really sure yet who is the enemy here. Are the Russians with us, or against us? Will they long tolerate the training of Chechen rebels by Islamists? Are the Chinese really in it to join the "international community" (whatever the hell that means) or are they in it just for themselves? Are the Japanese genuinely committed to amending their Constitution and assuming their role as the world's second largest economic and who should be the second largest military power as well? What is going on in Somalia, does anyone know? Can anyone in the intelligence community give a briefing concerning the "take on the ground" from any place in the world, except for Washington D.C., which is apparently the only place that the analysts know what's going on and even then the pundits can't agree on it and we end up with two years of investigations into what is tantamount to a he-said/she-said and that sounds like a split infinitive and we had better boldly stay away from those. We haven't got the slightest idea as to what the take on the ground is in Mexico City or Rio or even Montreal much less Baghdad, Kabul, Tehran, Beijing, or Moscow. If we did, maybe the leadership would display a little more Bismarkian cunning when it comes to foreign relations, instead of the current system whereby every US combat death is broadcast immediately when it happens. Don't you think that maybe that's exactly the signal that the Islamists are looking for? They get free confirmation and effect of their latest action and when we engage them we get nothing. Every victory for us is meaningless and every attack for them is worth a hundred of our actual victories in the number and caliber of the people they are able to recruit. Every word uttered by seditionous and treasonous public officals utterly undoes the efforts of every US serviceperson throughout the entire field of combat, whether it be actually in combat, or engaged in nation-building. That's what really just pisses me off more than anything right now, is the galling ability of the Left to escape clear condemnation of moral hypocrisy concerning nation-building when foreign policy conundrum was essentially always concerned with nation-building, from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo, the Left waxed eloquent concerning the need for American power to help people who could not help themselves and now that a Republican President has wholesale adopted their vision (something that usually meant the person being copied had won the argument) freeing more than 50 million people from two of the most oppressive regimes on the planet, they stand their with their hands in the pockets looking at the ground like a twelve year old you caught smoking a cigarette. He made me do it, and they point to Dubya. It's pitiful. A dutiful opposition party would have much traction right now, decrying the wasteful spending of America's dollar during a time war, demanding a declaration of war against ALL state sponsors of terrorism and ALL terrorist organizations worldwide, and recognizing only TOTAL victory on the battefield; they would be up in arms over the nature of the borders, a genuine opposition party would have the GOP on their heels in a second. Which of course leads me to the conclusion that the entire cadre of Democratic leadership are actually Karl Rove's agents, planted by Rove as early as spermhood and possibly before he was even alive, through Divine intervention, Rove was able to plant Dean and Kennedy amongst others to insure that the GOP (Gored On Pork) remains in power indefinitely.
That's the only conclusion that I can reach. There is legitimate criticism to be made of both the administration and Congress. But the Democrats haven't made one legitmate criticism of either since 9/11! The only good proposal that any Democrat has made in the past five years was to increase the size of the military and I can't remember who proposed that, but that's it! Nothing constructive, nothing positive, nothing to indicate that there's one iota of intelligence anywhere on the Left except Mickey Kaus and Christopher Hitchens, and Victor Davis Hanson, who I believe considers himself to be a liberal, but don't quote me on that. Which means that not only does the Right alliance have to be the ones making legitimate criticism, but it means that we can count out a significant plurality of the population when it comes to legitimate decision making capability.
I'm not sure there are any recommenations that I have only that we have to recognize that we are at war. Until that realization comes to everyone, until everyone understands that this conflict will not simply go away by making everyone take conflict resolution classes, we will make no real progress. Every one of accomplishments is immediately overshadowed by any number of what constitutes digital setbacks. The power of the internet has made information available to everyone. A jihadist can look up the names of the soldiers that he and his companions have killed and recite their names aloud and proclaim to Allah that they will only kill more of the infidel. And the leader of the Democratic Party can find himself suddenly the spokesman for al-Qaeda and not be aware at all of the strategic consequences of his actions. There is only one solution to this matter: declare war on all state-sponsors of terror and begin the long hard slog that will become known as World War IV. The longer we wait, the more the shadows of evil come together to form that black boot of authoritarianism that lurks every generation, that must be fought, that must be defeated if we are to live free. Do you think that China does not see the perfect opportunity brewing to allow them to take Taiwan? Israel, threatened by the imminent arrival of Iranian nuclear weapons, attacks Iran, which in turn attacks Israel, which in turn retaliates again, and 160,000 US forces and who knows how many aircraft are already in the region and suddenly, what has up to this point been a relatively quick and efficient modern US war becomes a bloody war of attrition whereby the US essentially is caught in the cross-fire and we find ourselves in the strategically enviable position and knocking out both Syria and Iran, which constitute massive reinforcements being sent and then kaboom! The Chinese begin an all out invasion of Taiwan and we are stuck. What then, if North Korea, acting alongside the Chinese, decides, what the hell, let's go for South Korea? Random Muslim extremists throughout the world, where ever they live in clusters, begin tactics similar to what happened in Paris recently? Without any warning at all, the world has gone from relative peace to relative conflict in a matter of weeks. We are always so tempted to cite history at this point, and say that similar circumstances have happened before, look at how quickly the assasination of Archduke Ferdinand precipitated a war no one thought was possible. Why levels of foreign trade between the Great Powers of Europe were never again reached until the mid 1990's, when everyone was again proclaiming that war between the great powers was all but impossible, just as they had proclaimed in the years, months, and weeks leading up the Great War. And here we are today, descendants of the world that the Great War left us with, a world divided between nation-states that were actually nation-states, and the rest, the Gray Area of the world. The Gray area that is only that much grayer because we have no idea what's really going on there. What the people are saying. A message boards only gives you so much of an idea of a person's heritage, their motivations, their desires. Human intelligence can never replace digital intelligence, and yet here we are, with no human intelligence and a glut of digital intelligence that we can't even begin to sift throuhg. Our tactics are pitiful. Our ability to control information escaping to the enemy, pitiful. The behavior of most of our so-called allies, pitiful. Before we can proceed to the next chapter of human evolution, namely, the integration of technology into our biological make-up, we must defeat this last rag-tag band of savages, and we must defeat them before our Leftist elites give them any more cause to continue fighting. We must develop a strategic vision and then set out to implement it. We cannot rely on the euphemism that is "democracy" which we tout round the world while ignoring the underlying basis for the success of our way of our life. We can no longer hope to get by on blind luck, because sooner or later, we will be attacked on American soil. And we can only hope that the next attack will not be a nuclear, biological, chemical, electromagnetic, or any other. We can only hope that instead we kill the bastards before they kill any more of us. And the only way to do that is head on, with a ferocity and intensity that we have displayed before, in the face of very similar tactics. They were called kamikazes then and they are called suicide bombers today. We defeated them once and by George Washington, we will defeat them again.
So many people scoff at the future that is inevitable--there are simply too many resources, too many places to go and see first hand. If you haven't ever perused the websites of the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter for several years, or the Cassini craft that is currently orbiting Saturn, or the massive amount of imagery that the Mars rovers have returned in their trek across Mars, you really should, because they are spectacular. Who doesn't want to go and see those places, to examine the geology and possible biology of those planets? Or more importantly, who doesn't see dollars to be earned. I pointed out yonks ago that Ceres, an asteroid that orbits just outside of Mars is 80% ice water. That means it contains more freshwater than the entire Earth does!!! And we're worried about depleting resources. But beyond that, the advances that WILL happen in molecular nanotechnolgy, biotechnology, and robotics over the next twenty years will make the future a great deal more dangerous than it is even right now, especially as the forces that are at work in the world right now coalesce. And that's really what this post is about: our leaders, our pundits, our everybody pretty much doesn't seem to be aware of the undercurrents that are happening throughout the world. There are several things that I always take note of when I read the news:
1. There is rarely, and I mean rarely any news reported out of China, and I am aware of the recent reports of massive pollution and contamination of water supplies there. But that was the first report of any significance that had been pried out of China since a reported for the Voice of America, I believe, managed to get video out of Chinese villagers and police forces engaged in, well, the cops were trying to put down a protest and the protesters didn't like it too much.
2. There is rarely, and I mean rarely any news still to this day reported out of Russia. You have to go and look for news about Russia. You just don't find it on any common website that is an American one. Instead there's a hodgepodge. You can go to Pravda via Drudge, but their translators are terrible and the stories read like old Soviet press releases. Yuck.
3. There is rarely, and I mean rarely any news reported out of Iran...
Do you see a trend here? The Western nations on the other hand, all have plenty of information coming out of them, for free. Information that provides all those other nations that don't have information coming out of them with all the knowledge that they need to figure out just how effective their current strategies may or may not be. In other words, we are providing a ready made and free propaganda machine to the enemy, and therein lies the problem. We aren't really sure yet who is the enemy here. Are the Russians with us, or against us? Will they long tolerate the training of Chechen rebels by Islamists? Are the Chinese really in it to join the "international community" (whatever the hell that means) or are they in it just for themselves? Are the Japanese genuinely committed to amending their Constitution and assuming their role as the world's second largest economic and who should be the second largest military power as well? What is going on in Somalia, does anyone know? Can anyone in the intelligence community give a briefing concerning the "take on the ground" from any place in the world, except for Washington D.C., which is apparently the only place that the analysts know what's going on and even then the pundits can't agree on it and we end up with two years of investigations into what is tantamount to a he-said/she-said and that sounds like a split infinitive and we had better boldly stay away from those. We haven't got the slightest idea as to what the take on the ground is in Mexico City or Rio or even Montreal much less Baghdad, Kabul, Tehran, Beijing, or Moscow. If we did, maybe the leadership would display a little more Bismarkian cunning when it comes to foreign relations, instead of the current system whereby every US combat death is broadcast immediately when it happens. Don't you think that maybe that's exactly the signal that the Islamists are looking for? They get free confirmation and effect of their latest action and when we engage them we get nothing. Every victory for us is meaningless and every attack for them is worth a hundred of our actual victories in the number and caliber of the people they are able to recruit. Every word uttered by seditionous and treasonous public officals utterly undoes the efforts of every US serviceperson throughout the entire field of combat, whether it be actually in combat, or engaged in nation-building. That's what really just pisses me off more than anything right now, is the galling ability of the Left to escape clear condemnation of moral hypocrisy concerning nation-building when foreign policy conundrum was essentially always concerned with nation-building, from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo, the Left waxed eloquent concerning the need for American power to help people who could not help themselves and now that a Republican President has wholesale adopted their vision (something that usually meant the person being copied had won the argument) freeing more than 50 million people from two of the most oppressive regimes on the planet, they stand their with their hands in the pockets looking at the ground like a twelve year old you caught smoking a cigarette. He made me do it, and they point to Dubya. It's pitiful. A dutiful opposition party would have much traction right now, decrying the wasteful spending of America's dollar during a time war, demanding a declaration of war against ALL state sponsors of terrorism and ALL terrorist organizations worldwide, and recognizing only TOTAL victory on the battefield; they would be up in arms over the nature of the borders, a genuine opposition party would have the GOP on their heels in a second. Which of course leads me to the conclusion that the entire cadre of Democratic leadership are actually Karl Rove's agents, planted by Rove as early as spermhood and possibly before he was even alive, through Divine intervention, Rove was able to plant Dean and Kennedy amongst others to insure that the GOP (Gored On Pork) remains in power indefinitely.
That's the only conclusion that I can reach. There is legitimate criticism to be made of both the administration and Congress. But the Democrats haven't made one legitmate criticism of either since 9/11! The only good proposal that any Democrat has made in the past five years was to increase the size of the military and I can't remember who proposed that, but that's it! Nothing constructive, nothing positive, nothing to indicate that there's one iota of intelligence anywhere on the Left except Mickey Kaus and Christopher Hitchens, and Victor Davis Hanson, who I believe considers himself to be a liberal, but don't quote me on that. Which means that not only does the Right alliance have to be the ones making legitimate criticism, but it means that we can count out a significant plurality of the population when it comes to legitimate decision making capability.
I'm not sure there are any recommenations that I have only that we have to recognize that we are at war. Until that realization comes to everyone, until everyone understands that this conflict will not simply go away by making everyone take conflict resolution classes, we will make no real progress. Every one of accomplishments is immediately overshadowed by any number of what constitutes digital setbacks. The power of the internet has made information available to everyone. A jihadist can look up the names of the soldiers that he and his companions have killed and recite their names aloud and proclaim to Allah that they will only kill more of the infidel. And the leader of the Democratic Party can find himself suddenly the spokesman for al-Qaeda and not be aware at all of the strategic consequences of his actions. There is only one solution to this matter: declare war on all state-sponsors of terror and begin the long hard slog that will become known as World War IV. The longer we wait, the more the shadows of evil come together to form that black boot of authoritarianism that lurks every generation, that must be fought, that must be defeated if we are to live free. Do you think that China does not see the perfect opportunity brewing to allow them to take Taiwan? Israel, threatened by the imminent arrival of Iranian nuclear weapons, attacks Iran, which in turn attacks Israel, which in turn retaliates again, and 160,000 US forces and who knows how many aircraft are already in the region and suddenly, what has up to this point been a relatively quick and efficient modern US war becomes a bloody war of attrition whereby the US essentially is caught in the cross-fire and we find ourselves in the strategically enviable position and knocking out both Syria and Iran, which constitute massive reinforcements being sent and then kaboom! The Chinese begin an all out invasion of Taiwan and we are stuck. What then, if North Korea, acting alongside the Chinese, decides, what the hell, let's go for South Korea? Random Muslim extremists throughout the world, where ever they live in clusters, begin tactics similar to what happened in Paris recently? Without any warning at all, the world has gone from relative peace to relative conflict in a matter of weeks. We are always so tempted to cite history at this point, and say that similar circumstances have happened before, look at how quickly the assasination of Archduke Ferdinand precipitated a war no one thought was possible. Why levels of foreign trade between the Great Powers of Europe were never again reached until the mid 1990's, when everyone was again proclaiming that war between the great powers was all but impossible, just as they had proclaimed in the years, months, and weeks leading up the Great War. And here we are today, descendants of the world that the Great War left us with, a world divided between nation-states that were actually nation-states, and the rest, the Gray Area of the world. The Gray area that is only that much grayer because we have no idea what's really going on there. What the people are saying. A message boards only gives you so much of an idea of a person's heritage, their motivations, their desires. Human intelligence can never replace digital intelligence, and yet here we are, with no human intelligence and a glut of digital intelligence that we can't even begin to sift throuhg. Our tactics are pitiful. Our ability to control information escaping to the enemy, pitiful. The behavior of most of our so-called allies, pitiful. Before we can proceed to the next chapter of human evolution, namely, the integration of technology into our biological make-up, we must defeat this last rag-tag band of savages, and we must defeat them before our Leftist elites give them any more cause to continue fighting. We must develop a strategic vision and then set out to implement it. We cannot rely on the euphemism that is "democracy" which we tout round the world while ignoring the underlying basis for the success of our way of our life. We can no longer hope to get by on blind luck, because sooner or later, we will be attacked on American soil. And we can only hope that the next attack will not be a nuclear, biological, chemical, electromagnetic, or any other. We can only hope that instead we kill the bastards before they kill any more of us. And the only way to do that is head on, with a ferocity and intensity that we have displayed before, in the face of very similar tactics. They were called kamikazes then and they are called suicide bombers today. We defeated them once and by George Washington, we will defeat them again.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Remember?
I have only briefly glanced at what the Mudville Gazette has arranged for us to read here. The point that I just want to briefly make is that our adherence to Congress of Vienna era defintions of nation-states is severly limiting our ability to conduct the war against Islamofascism as it could be. For all intents and purposes, we have been fighting a significant "hot" phase of the war since we decided to repel Saddam from Kuwait, with multiple flare-ups, showdowns, bombing campaigns, invasion, occupation, and reconstruction. And now we're engaged in a national debate with the Seriously Stuck on Stupid Party that seems intent on doing everything they can to succeed in bringing back enforcement of the Sedition Acts while the Republicans cower behind the corner asking frightfully, "Are you sure we're the majority?"
As to the limitations imposed on us by essentially pre-World War I rules concerning the behavior of nation-states, keep this in mind: the people of the Muslim world generally view themselves as Muslim first, nationality second. But for Muslims this identity is deeper than the identity that Christians create concerning their relationship with their savior--for Muslims, Islam is the only institution that hasn't failed them (though it has), hasn't abandoned them, hasn't left them shuddering in the face of centuries of collective might from what they consider to be primitive and barbaric civilizations. Thus, think of the Muslim people living in Europe, they are united by an extranationality that goes beyond whether or not they are Moroccans or Afghans or Algerians--they are Muslim.
The nation-states that are all involved (for the most part) are constructs of the post-colonial world. They are not nation-states in the tradition of the West, geographic areas of common language, culture, traditions, heritage, but are instead, just drawn lines. Even Iran, a country that can trace its' roots back to Persia, is not a Persian country. For one thing, Persians were not Muslims. But that's beside the point. One could argue that Iran is perhaps the most complete nation within the umma that has roots that could be argued are more Western in nature than any other umma state, even Turkey, though that may be a toss-up. We should stop treating these separate "states" as separate entities when they are in fact only separate in administration, they are not separate in drive, motivation, and their ultimate desire, to establish a global umma.
Had we felt this way in the getgo, we would never have stopped at Kuwait in 1991, we would have liberated Iraq in 1991 and done the hard task that we are now engaged in.
And finally, think about all those countries that the United States never stopped "occupying" and think of how much we poured into making sure that Europe remained safe from the the threat of communism, how up until ten years ago there were still 200,000+ troops in Europe and more than 100,000+ in Asia. Are we supposed to simply call those troops home to, because they are been engaged in nation-building for the better part of sixty years now?
Great nations must do great things, otherwise they become great history. And I have no interest in seeing our nation-state, a nation-state forged on the backs of countless free men and women, becoming a great nation-state historically. Again, I implore the President to seek a declaration of war against all state-sponsors of terrorism and the terrorists themselves. Action is what gave the President his significant domestic legislative victories. Inaction is what has caused the President to become mired in the mediocrity that is the US Congress.
As to the limitations imposed on us by essentially pre-World War I rules concerning the behavior of nation-states, keep this in mind: the people of the Muslim world generally view themselves as Muslim first, nationality second. But for Muslims this identity is deeper than the identity that Christians create concerning their relationship with their savior--for Muslims, Islam is the only institution that hasn't failed them (though it has), hasn't abandoned them, hasn't left them shuddering in the face of centuries of collective might from what they consider to be primitive and barbaric civilizations. Thus, think of the Muslim people living in Europe, they are united by an extranationality that goes beyond whether or not they are Moroccans or Afghans or Algerians--they are Muslim.
The nation-states that are all involved (for the most part) are constructs of the post-colonial world. They are not nation-states in the tradition of the West, geographic areas of common language, culture, traditions, heritage, but are instead, just drawn lines. Even Iran, a country that can trace its' roots back to Persia, is not a Persian country. For one thing, Persians were not Muslims. But that's beside the point. One could argue that Iran is perhaps the most complete nation within the umma that has roots that could be argued are more Western in nature than any other umma state, even Turkey, though that may be a toss-up. We should stop treating these separate "states" as separate entities when they are in fact only separate in administration, they are not separate in drive, motivation, and their ultimate desire, to establish a global umma.
Had we felt this way in the getgo, we would never have stopped at Kuwait in 1991, we would have liberated Iraq in 1991 and done the hard task that we are now engaged in.
And finally, think about all those countries that the United States never stopped "occupying" and think of how much we poured into making sure that Europe remained safe from the the threat of communism, how up until ten years ago there were still 200,000+ troops in Europe and more than 100,000+ in Asia. Are we supposed to simply call those troops home to, because they are been engaged in nation-building for the better part of sixty years now?
Great nations must do great things, otherwise they become great history. And I have no interest in seeing our nation-state, a nation-state forged on the backs of countless free men and women, becoming a great nation-state historically. Again, I implore the President to seek a declaration of war against all state-sponsors of terrorism and the terrorists themselves. Action is what gave the President his significant domestic legislative victories. Inaction is what has caused the President to become mired in the mediocrity that is the US Congress.
Monday, November 14, 2005
...and the tragedy is always comic
What do we laugh at the most? Think about it. Really think about it. What do you really find funny? Watching some guy swinging from a rope swing, letting go and falling headsmack right into a tree and then falling through multiple limbs on his inevitable descent to the ground? Yeah, that's what I thought. Think slapstick, toilet humor, the Three Freaking Stooges for crying out loud! Physical suffering, unintentional or intentional is almost always funny. Why?
I think it's our way of dealing with the tragedy of the situation. We see some guy walking down the street listening to his iPod and he doesn't notice the telephone pole and WHACK, he runs right into it and all I can do to keep from laughing is turn around and pretend to be on my cell phone. I watch people all the time doing completely stupid and inane shit and have a hard time believing that I too do exactly the same kind of shit.
For instance, the other day I woke up moderatly late, late enough that I didn't hurry my ass up I would be late for work. So I jumped up, unaware that my legs had become entangled in the sheets, I lost my balance, and in an ill-advised attempt by my reflexes to correct the impending collapse onto the floor in some random heap, one foot struck out for the closest object upon which I could stand: the bed frame. Unknown to me, I had developed a rather large callous on my toe from wearing large boots at three shows all weekend at Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski and as my foot descended toward the bed frame, a rather sharp and obtrusive piece of metal when you really think about it, it managed to catch this callous at exactly the right location to split it open from the base up. Needless to say, I did not go to work that afternoon.
But stupid, inane and completely accidental. It hurt so much all I could was laugh, and laugh I did. Which is really, honestly, all that I can do at this point.
Put it to you this way: if the country that created such giants as Voltaire, Bastiat, Diderot, Rousseau, Joan of Arc, Charles the Hammer, Pascal, Balzac, not to mention Monet, Manet, fine food and a knack for being unable to win any military conflict at any point since before the Battle of Waterloo, which was in 1812, well, if that country becomes as Mark Steyn puts it, "the third Muslim nuclear power", then we're in for a long hard slog. A lot longer and a lot harder than anything we've ever had to do, and something that will shape the future in a way that is hard to now imagine. A future that had we accepted the role destiny put in our laps much earlier would not have been so difficult, and of course, I am talking about the undeniable fact that we should have used the provisions under the Constitution which enable us to turn territories into states as much as possible. Cuba, should have a been state. Think about how much headache that would have kept us from, not to mention being unable to smoke Cuban cigars, legally, for all these long decades. In fact, the Caribbean as a whole, all states, situation fixed. The Phillipines, should have spent some time as a territory and then, boom, another state. All the countries we liberated in world war II, states. Japan, South Korea, hell, Taiwan. All states. Germany, Britain and of course Ireland, and any of the members of British Empire, really, and of course France. If France had become a state, none of this would have ever been a problem.
Our problem as a society, is that there is too much of Athens running in our blood and not enough of Sparta. We have become overcivilized. Overcivilized and it's despicable. Everything that's any fun, whether it be the occassional rumble or isolated fistfight, smoking, smoking in your car in some places, people being charged with public drunkenness after leaving bars, everything that really, on the underbelly, marks the health of the class which lives only for the moment, which unfortunately, makes up a substantial if not majority portion of the population, everythign has been criminalized. You can't even light up a cigarette in public in most places anymore in the West and this from a culture that spawned the Industrial Revolution, which, if you had been alive in 1850 or so you wouldn't have made it three steps down the sidewalk in London such would have been the smell, to say nothing of even the smell in 1900.
The time for such thoughts is not now. We can't fault the past until we develop time travel and screw it up royally. Just think Doc Brown. Great Scott!
None of that is going to change unfortunately. Only makes me more convinced that every law should have an expiration date, that way we don't build up laws on the books and the number of laws and regulations remain more or less permanent, and it takes away time from the executive branch bureaucracy from enforcing--because they have to write new regs all the time silly!
Which again, the tragic is comic. We must face facts:
1) France will not long survive this most current front in the war against Islamofascism.
2) What's the saying, once France falls the rest of Europe will know its curtains? Oh, I just made that up. Not that some of Europe might not fight back, or that they might even ask for our help. I'm telling we ought to invoke the NATO charter and send in SOFOR to handle this. That way you'd make the French citizens know who is protecting them, and who have always been protecting them, Americans.
3) The longer the riots go on, the sooner the appeasement begins.
4) At this point, it's fairly obvious that the intensity of the riots don't matter. They could be setting fire to garbage bins and as long as they set fire to enough garbage bins the effect would be the same.
5) Has anybody thought about the thousands of French motorists who no longer have cars? Maybe the EU should give them each a brand new one! But seriously, these people are NOT innocents. They have allowed this perverse biculturalism to fester too long in the country that created eclairs. Shame, shame, shame!
The question is, when the riots become goal oriented? In other words, when will a Lenin appear on the scene and unite the disparate, almost autonomous factions scattered throughout Europe but together a potent force for action. What could twenty millions Muslims entrenched in Europe accomplish tomorrow if they really wanted to? Would the Europeans be able to defend themselves? Can they defend themselves? Should we help them? Does it matter one iota what one poll in America says about anything? That was completely random.
But important. The President seems stuck in neutral. The GOP, beholden to a Soros funded shadow group (somewhere at MichelleMalkin...you go and find it!) of so-called "moderates" (read: useless pragmatists who balk at the first sign of trouble) is unable to cut $50 billion out of the budget over the NEXT TEN YEARS and the Senate can't even hold a commitee vote on maintaining the current tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
Fiddling while Rome burns indeed.
And what is the most important issue to the Left, Bush lied. Dr. Sanity does a far better job than I can to explain the pyschology of Bush hatred (doesn't sound natural does it...). Suffice it to say I can understand where the Bush haters are coming from. I despised Clinton throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. I grew up, proud and defiant in the era of Reagan and came of age, cynical and disappointed, in the era of Clinton. No man has done more to temper my idealism or belief in the perfectability of our form of government than the man from Hope, and I daresay that he continues to offend me in ways that don't even approach the ways than Carter and that's only because Carter offends me in ways that are tangible. Being almost entirely at fault for letting the Islamofascists gain such a strong foothold so early on. But with Clinton it was entirely intangible. Everything about the man made me want to scream. The way people admired him, the way he smiled, fakely, at everthing, the way he would hold press conferences just to bask in the glow of the White House press corps. The way every few months seemd to hold some new investigation into some part of his administration. History will be glowing in their praise of Clinton if they refer to his administration as the most corrupt in history; a more apt description would be engaged in activites that border on having severely curtailed the national security of this nation. Even to this day I cannot believe the list of scandals the Clinton administration went through, and I'm not going to name all of them, just the ones that stick out: Whitewater, Vince Foster, Ron Brown, the WH possession of FBI files on thousands of political opponents, illegal campaign contributions, the selling of White House bedrooms for campaign contributors, the various investigations into Mike Espy the HUD secretary, the number of Clinton administration officials indicted and convicted, not to mention perjury and obstruction of justice and the wholesale acceptance of his philandering by the feminist left and the mainstream media, which had he been a Republican, would have landed him in the slammer as a rapist, in which case, Slick Willy would have taken on an entirely new connotation.
So, suffice it tos ay, I know something about hating a President so much that every day you wake up determined to convince everyone else that the President ought to be impeached, so much so that you spend the better part of ten months with signs in the back of your car that read "IMPEACHMENT NOW". That you go to the Senate trial. That you watch the vote count and remember wanting to pound Arlen Specter for being such a sissy. That you remember telling some kind named Dan that there wouldn't be a NASA for him to work for in the future because the Republic had effectively ended.
And then the malaise lifted. I suddenly understood what crippled so many of Bubba's critics. You couldn't attack him personally. People saw too much of themselves in Bill. People saw the flaws that they themselves have experienced. In many ways, Clinton is not just the consummate politician, but the greatest political figure the country may have ever produced. And I don't mean that as a compliment: Bill Clinton is the last remnant of industrial politics. He was tailor made for TV. A Nazi geneticist could not have created a better posterchild for progressive politics. Bill Clinton is to everyone what they want him to be. Simultaneously denying and accepting every position because he has none himself. The only way to oppose Clinton was to forget about him. To look past his modest successes and see instead how his presence unified the conversative and libertarian elements and how had he not been elected in 1992, the dramatic conservative takeover in 1994 would probably not have happened. And that, was really the last straw that made me love Bill Clinton. He gave me five glorious years with of Mr. Prime Minister, Newt Gingrich. Thanking him saved me, and it let me put the hate aside.
The Left cannot ever thank Dubya. And that is their weakness. To never give your opponent even the slightest bit of wiggling room, to never say, hey, maybe you're right, that's a good point, yes, let's take that under advisement, is not a strategy for winning more votes, it's the actions of a reactionary who is seeking to hold on to what they with every last bit of strength and nothing seems to be working. And Republicans still hold a 2-1 fund raising advantage despite all of their tactical missteps in the past ten months or so. So, yes, things are rather tragic looking right now, but you've go to laugh then haven't you?
I think it's our way of dealing with the tragedy of the situation. We see some guy walking down the street listening to his iPod and he doesn't notice the telephone pole and WHACK, he runs right into it and all I can do to keep from laughing is turn around and pretend to be on my cell phone. I watch people all the time doing completely stupid and inane shit and have a hard time believing that I too do exactly the same kind of shit.
For instance, the other day I woke up moderatly late, late enough that I didn't hurry my ass up I would be late for work. So I jumped up, unaware that my legs had become entangled in the sheets, I lost my balance, and in an ill-advised attempt by my reflexes to correct the impending collapse onto the floor in some random heap, one foot struck out for the closest object upon which I could stand: the bed frame. Unknown to me, I had developed a rather large callous on my toe from wearing large boots at three shows all weekend at Walter Sobchak from The Big Lebowski and as my foot descended toward the bed frame, a rather sharp and obtrusive piece of metal when you really think about it, it managed to catch this callous at exactly the right location to split it open from the base up. Needless to say, I did not go to work that afternoon.
But stupid, inane and completely accidental. It hurt so much all I could was laugh, and laugh I did. Which is really, honestly, all that I can do at this point.
Put it to you this way: if the country that created such giants as Voltaire, Bastiat, Diderot, Rousseau, Joan of Arc, Charles the Hammer, Pascal, Balzac, not to mention Monet, Manet, fine food and a knack for being unable to win any military conflict at any point since before the Battle of Waterloo, which was in 1812, well, if that country becomes as Mark Steyn puts it, "the third Muslim nuclear power", then we're in for a long hard slog. A lot longer and a lot harder than anything we've ever had to do, and something that will shape the future in a way that is hard to now imagine. A future that had we accepted the role destiny put in our laps much earlier would not have been so difficult, and of course, I am talking about the undeniable fact that we should have used the provisions under the Constitution which enable us to turn territories into states as much as possible. Cuba, should have a been state. Think about how much headache that would have kept us from, not to mention being unable to smoke Cuban cigars, legally, for all these long decades. In fact, the Caribbean as a whole, all states, situation fixed. The Phillipines, should have spent some time as a territory and then, boom, another state. All the countries we liberated in world war II, states. Japan, South Korea, hell, Taiwan. All states. Germany, Britain and of course Ireland, and any of the members of British Empire, really, and of course France. If France had become a state, none of this would have ever been a problem.
Our problem as a society, is that there is too much of Athens running in our blood and not enough of Sparta. We have become overcivilized. Overcivilized and it's despicable. Everything that's any fun, whether it be the occassional rumble or isolated fistfight, smoking, smoking in your car in some places, people being charged with public drunkenness after leaving bars, everything that really, on the underbelly, marks the health of the class which lives only for the moment, which unfortunately, makes up a substantial if not majority portion of the population, everythign has been criminalized. You can't even light up a cigarette in public in most places anymore in the West and this from a culture that spawned the Industrial Revolution, which, if you had been alive in 1850 or so you wouldn't have made it three steps down the sidewalk in London such would have been the smell, to say nothing of even the smell in 1900.
The time for such thoughts is not now. We can't fault the past until we develop time travel and screw it up royally. Just think Doc Brown. Great Scott!
None of that is going to change unfortunately. Only makes me more convinced that every law should have an expiration date, that way we don't build up laws on the books and the number of laws and regulations remain more or less permanent, and it takes away time from the executive branch bureaucracy from enforcing--because they have to write new regs all the time silly!
Which again, the tragic is comic. We must face facts:
1) France will not long survive this most current front in the war against Islamofascism.
2) What's the saying, once France falls the rest of Europe will know its curtains? Oh, I just made that up. Not that some of Europe might not fight back, or that they might even ask for our help. I'm telling we ought to invoke the NATO charter and send in SOFOR to handle this. That way you'd make the French citizens know who is protecting them, and who have always been protecting them, Americans.
3) The longer the riots go on, the sooner the appeasement begins.
4) At this point, it's fairly obvious that the intensity of the riots don't matter. They could be setting fire to garbage bins and as long as they set fire to enough garbage bins the effect would be the same.
5) Has anybody thought about the thousands of French motorists who no longer have cars? Maybe the EU should give them each a brand new one! But seriously, these people are NOT innocents. They have allowed this perverse biculturalism to fester too long in the country that created eclairs. Shame, shame, shame!
The question is, when the riots become goal oriented? In other words, when will a Lenin appear on the scene and unite the disparate, almost autonomous factions scattered throughout Europe but together a potent force for action. What could twenty millions Muslims entrenched in Europe accomplish tomorrow if they really wanted to? Would the Europeans be able to defend themselves? Can they defend themselves? Should we help them? Does it matter one iota what one poll in America says about anything? That was completely random.
But important. The President seems stuck in neutral. The GOP, beholden to a Soros funded shadow group (somewhere at MichelleMalkin...you go and find it!) of so-called "moderates" (read: useless pragmatists who balk at the first sign of trouble) is unable to cut $50 billion out of the budget over the NEXT TEN YEARS and the Senate can't even hold a commitee vote on maintaining the current tax rates on capital gains and dividends.
Fiddling while Rome burns indeed.
And what is the most important issue to the Left, Bush lied. Dr. Sanity does a far better job than I can to explain the pyschology of Bush hatred (doesn't sound natural does it...). Suffice it to say I can understand where the Bush haters are coming from. I despised Clinton throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. I grew up, proud and defiant in the era of Reagan and came of age, cynical and disappointed, in the era of Clinton. No man has done more to temper my idealism or belief in the perfectability of our form of government than the man from Hope, and I daresay that he continues to offend me in ways that don't even approach the ways than Carter and that's only because Carter offends me in ways that are tangible. Being almost entirely at fault for letting the Islamofascists gain such a strong foothold so early on. But with Clinton it was entirely intangible. Everything about the man made me want to scream. The way people admired him, the way he smiled, fakely, at everthing, the way he would hold press conferences just to bask in the glow of the White House press corps. The way every few months seemd to hold some new investigation into some part of his administration. History will be glowing in their praise of Clinton if they refer to his administration as the most corrupt in history; a more apt description would be engaged in activites that border on having severely curtailed the national security of this nation. Even to this day I cannot believe the list of scandals the Clinton administration went through, and I'm not going to name all of them, just the ones that stick out: Whitewater, Vince Foster, Ron Brown, the WH possession of FBI files on thousands of political opponents, illegal campaign contributions, the selling of White House bedrooms for campaign contributors, the various investigations into Mike Espy the HUD secretary, the number of Clinton administration officials indicted and convicted, not to mention perjury and obstruction of justice and the wholesale acceptance of his philandering by the feminist left and the mainstream media, which had he been a Republican, would have landed him in the slammer as a rapist, in which case, Slick Willy would have taken on an entirely new connotation.
So, suffice it tos ay, I know something about hating a President so much that every day you wake up determined to convince everyone else that the President ought to be impeached, so much so that you spend the better part of ten months with signs in the back of your car that read "IMPEACHMENT NOW". That you go to the Senate trial. That you watch the vote count and remember wanting to pound Arlen Specter for being such a sissy. That you remember telling some kind named Dan that there wouldn't be a NASA for him to work for in the future because the Republic had effectively ended.
And then the malaise lifted. I suddenly understood what crippled so many of Bubba's critics. You couldn't attack him personally. People saw too much of themselves in Bill. People saw the flaws that they themselves have experienced. In many ways, Clinton is not just the consummate politician, but the greatest political figure the country may have ever produced. And I don't mean that as a compliment: Bill Clinton is the last remnant of industrial politics. He was tailor made for TV. A Nazi geneticist could not have created a better posterchild for progressive politics. Bill Clinton is to everyone what they want him to be. Simultaneously denying and accepting every position because he has none himself. The only way to oppose Clinton was to forget about him. To look past his modest successes and see instead how his presence unified the conversative and libertarian elements and how had he not been elected in 1992, the dramatic conservative takeover in 1994 would probably not have happened. And that, was really the last straw that made me love Bill Clinton. He gave me five glorious years with of Mr. Prime Minister, Newt Gingrich. Thanking him saved me, and it let me put the hate aside.
The Left cannot ever thank Dubya. And that is their weakness. To never give your opponent even the slightest bit of wiggling room, to never say, hey, maybe you're right, that's a good point, yes, let's take that under advisement, is not a strategy for winning more votes, it's the actions of a reactionary who is seeking to hold on to what they with every last bit of strength and nothing seems to be working. And Republicans still hold a 2-1 fund raising advantage despite all of their tactical missteps in the past ten months or so. So, yes, things are rather tragic looking right now, but you've go to laugh then haven't you?
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
the comedy is always tragic...
The Earth these last few months has held to the same course that it has kept, relatively unchanged, for much of the past four billion years. There were no orbital deviations of consequences to report, although the entire planet did move a few millimeters off axis when the Sumatra earthquake hit early this year. The planet's magnetic field continued to wane, as we approach the period of the poles reversing, a process we can't even begin to understand. For an outside observer who wasn't paying any attention to the surface nuisance, things would have seemed just as they had the last time they visited, say a billion years before.
For the surface nuisance, things have changed greatly.
Our anthropic tendencies (tendencies because we are what we are and cannot deny it) cannot be explained away--we are products of an evolutionary system that has been at least three billion years in the works--three billion years of code errors and transcription problems and mutations from radiation, three billion or more years of the program we call life running non-stop, perpetuating itself until we came along to realize what was happening--an evolutionary system that spawned highly clustered neural nets that house our consciousness, our ability to turn these random elements on this screen into what constitutes language in our minds. We are not so separate from the world that we alienate ourselves from at every turn. Technology has made us masters of the moment--we can control our moment to moment existences in almost excruciating detail. There is, for those of in what constitutes the West, no elements of surprise. There are no challenges, save for those that we create ourselves, and to really be tested, you must be tested by situations that you have absolutely have no control over. When we do faces crises, we flip out. We become conspicuosly aware that technology has not allowed us to become masters of the whole--that no matter how many helicopters we have, no matter how many cameras we have placed throughout cities, no matter how many UAV's you have flying, you cannot control the random element that is the human being.
And of course, the prompt: the opening of the Eurabian civil war, which has for years engaged in an even lower level of activity against mostly Jewish targets throughout Europe, and has now of course become the potential fuse to the powderkeg.
There were plenty of signs, such as this one, long, long ago, and more recently some have been saying stuff like this, but the one thing that I want to point out is this: in roughly seven days, the affected areas went from one suburb of 40,000 some odd thousand, to three suburbs three days later, to three hundred cities eleven days after the initial electrocution, ostensibly as good as "lighting" of the fuse as any other (think assasination of Archduke Ferdinand, that type of thing) and then to a few random isolated events in Brussels and Germany.
A few weeks ago, Peggy Noonan had an article in the Wall Street Journal in which she wrote that "the wheels have come off the trolley and the trolley is off its tracks." And I read that with the specific intent of letting it sit. Of letting it settle. Too much is decided today without the necessary reflection that decisions of weight require--I'm not talking about the time required, I'm talking about the quality of the reflection. I'm talking about realizing that for the Islamists, the Battle of Tours was but a momentary blip on their eventual desire to extend the umma globally, just as the Ottoman Turks defeat at the gates of Vienna was only a roadbump--it has obviously not derailed their attempts to create Eurabia. That kind of reflection. It's important to put into perspective when we consider how unusual our period of history has been in that for the most part the wheels of the trolley were on and the trolley was in its tracks. That is an abberation in the great continuity of the human comedy, and it is also our tragedy. We find any time that things don't work exactly as they should that something must be done about it. We are astonished when the cable internet goes out, or our cellphone inexplicably cuts out, or any of the conveniences that we not only take for granted, but assume that our mastery of the moment extends to a mastery of the whole. We don't need to know how the cellphone works, only that it should. We don't need to understand how the internet works, only that it does. We have completely decoupled knowledge from experience and instead have made propietary knowledge, speciality knowledge the key component of our life experiences. One form of information, one form of thinking, one form of employment, and yet what we do in that time, what do we achieve, what do we personally build? I don't mean to diminish a person's hobbies, those things spent in "free time" (another modern concept), interests that may include the "amateur" tag, such as, "oh he's an amateur horticulturalist" or "she's an amatuer birdwatcher." What distinguishes one person as a professional and the other as an amateur? And who gets to make that determination?
We have for decades churned graduates out in the most proto-industrial manner: speciality of focus equals mastery of the moment. Specialists of every ilk and manner have been conceived and people who attain such speciality, i.e. those at the master and Ph.d level, dedicate their "careers" to usually that one specific area of study. What are the statistics on those who achieve one master's degree or Ph.d, how many of those choose to pursue another? And how many of those use their degrees in truly interdisciplinary research?
No one said that the division of labor would always indefinitely remain indispensable--indeed we have reached the point where soon all of our "labors" will be completely automated, where Westerners will not have to engage in any physical activity to maintain their survival at all. We are already nearly at that point. The division of labor has produced a cornucopia, but at the same time it has stolen something essential from us--the instinctive need to survive. We have blunted, meddled, contracpted, aborted, liberated the instinct to survive. Lest us never forget, we are as much a primate as any other primate alive today, domesticated or not, because that is what we have become. Domesticated, overcivilized, and unwilling to do the things necessary to preserve our common civilization. Much as it pains me to do so, France is a member of Western civilization. What better way to expose French hypocrisy than to offer a Marine division to help win back each of those "little Fallujahs" that pockmark the French landscape? What better way to make them see the unreality that they have been living? These acts of vandalism which constitute nothing more than abject abhorrence of the law and the concept of civil society should be met with exactly the kind of force that only a full Marine division can bring to bear against such reprobates. How would the French public respond to a public offer from the President of the United States to the President of France to give whatever military support necessary to thwart this beginning that could end quickly or build to something much, much worse. The worst would be France ceding control of those areas that are Muslim to Muslim authorities and setting the stage for the end of France as a Western nation-state. The best, Chirac mobilizes the Army and begins shooting on sight anyone doing anything that violates the provisions of curfew and the normal law and order expectations of a civil society.
Can we expect any other European country to stand up to this latest threat to Western civilization when none of them value the civilization that we have built? Can we expect the EU to bring it's Common Defense Force or whatever its called into action to preserve law and order? Can we expect anything but more of Noonan's feeling that the wheels have come off the trolley, or perhaps we should get used to the idea that things are indeed broken, that we cannot just put the trolley back on the tracks and keep going, that we might have to sacrifice something of the comfort that our ancestors earned for us, how blissfully unaware they were that it was the very fact that they had to work for whatever they had in order to appreciate it that made them great and that makes us merely dwarfs standing on the backs of giants. It makes all of our vaunted technological prowess seem as vaccuous as the vaunted singularity that approaches will lead us to be, for what is it to possess life if one no longer hears its music? If the sublime fails to touch you in some small way, seeing first light at dawn, feeling the vast abundance that the division of labor within nature produced long before humanity ever conceived of language or humanity itself and knowing that there is something there, there is some greater meaning than just being masters of the moment. That if we truly do believe in a culture of life that it is our responsibility to build nobler goals than sales pitches and Sunday brunch with your Sunday best and Wednesday night bible study--to believe something is not enough anymore, we must do it. We must understand that the only logical conclusion of a culture of life is the recognition that spreading humanity and life, life in our image, culture and belief systems, must be our penultimate goal. That again, we can do little to change a culture's mind whose penultimate goal is the destruction of all other religions and the incorporation of all people of planet Earth into the umma and a permanent static existence that they would gladly force upon everyone, just as they trying to force it upon the people of France this very day.
It becomes my belief more and more each day that we cannot defeat an enemy that we will not call out in name, that we cannot win a war in which we continue to trade with known enemies, that we cannot ever hope to proclaim victory if we do not first declare war. And that unfortunately, we may not be able to pacify an enemy who believes they are the only truly spiritual people on the planet, that they and they alone possess the truth, and that that truth is laid down in one book. Remember how dangerous Western civilization was when people believed that the only truth that existed was contained in the Bible? Truth flows not from an authority, but from experience, in the cumulative experiences of the billions of people who lived on this planet that tonight continues its present course and speed. Ahead at roughly one half impulse Mr. Sulu.
For the surface nuisance, things have changed greatly.
Our anthropic tendencies (tendencies because we are what we are and cannot deny it) cannot be explained away--we are products of an evolutionary system that has been at least three billion years in the works--three billion years of code errors and transcription problems and mutations from radiation, three billion or more years of the program we call life running non-stop, perpetuating itself until we came along to realize what was happening--an evolutionary system that spawned highly clustered neural nets that house our consciousness, our ability to turn these random elements on this screen into what constitutes language in our minds. We are not so separate from the world that we alienate ourselves from at every turn. Technology has made us masters of the moment--we can control our moment to moment existences in almost excruciating detail. There is, for those of in what constitutes the West, no elements of surprise. There are no challenges, save for those that we create ourselves, and to really be tested, you must be tested by situations that you have absolutely have no control over. When we do faces crises, we flip out. We become conspicuosly aware that technology has not allowed us to become masters of the whole--that no matter how many helicopters we have, no matter how many cameras we have placed throughout cities, no matter how many UAV's you have flying, you cannot control the random element that is the human being.
And of course, the prompt: the opening of the Eurabian civil war, which has for years engaged in an even lower level of activity against mostly Jewish targets throughout Europe, and has now of course become the potential fuse to the powderkeg.
There were plenty of signs, such as this one, long, long ago, and more recently some have been saying stuff like this, but the one thing that I want to point out is this: in roughly seven days, the affected areas went from one suburb of 40,000 some odd thousand, to three suburbs three days later, to three hundred cities eleven days after the initial electrocution, ostensibly as good as "lighting" of the fuse as any other (think assasination of Archduke Ferdinand, that type of thing) and then to a few random isolated events in Brussels and Germany.
A few weeks ago, Peggy Noonan had an article in the Wall Street Journal in which she wrote that "the wheels have come off the trolley and the trolley is off its tracks." And I read that with the specific intent of letting it sit. Of letting it settle. Too much is decided today without the necessary reflection that decisions of weight require--I'm not talking about the time required, I'm talking about the quality of the reflection. I'm talking about realizing that for the Islamists, the Battle of Tours was but a momentary blip on their eventual desire to extend the umma globally, just as the Ottoman Turks defeat at the gates of Vienna was only a roadbump--it has obviously not derailed their attempts to create Eurabia. That kind of reflection. It's important to put into perspective when we consider how unusual our period of history has been in that for the most part the wheels of the trolley were on and the trolley was in its tracks. That is an abberation in the great continuity of the human comedy, and it is also our tragedy. We find any time that things don't work exactly as they should that something must be done about it. We are astonished when the cable internet goes out, or our cellphone inexplicably cuts out, or any of the conveniences that we not only take for granted, but assume that our mastery of the moment extends to a mastery of the whole. We don't need to know how the cellphone works, only that it should. We don't need to understand how the internet works, only that it does. We have completely decoupled knowledge from experience and instead have made propietary knowledge, speciality knowledge the key component of our life experiences. One form of information, one form of thinking, one form of employment, and yet what we do in that time, what do we achieve, what do we personally build? I don't mean to diminish a person's hobbies, those things spent in "free time" (another modern concept), interests that may include the "amateur" tag, such as, "oh he's an amateur horticulturalist" or "she's an amatuer birdwatcher." What distinguishes one person as a professional and the other as an amateur? And who gets to make that determination?
We have for decades churned graduates out in the most proto-industrial manner: speciality of focus equals mastery of the moment. Specialists of every ilk and manner have been conceived and people who attain such speciality, i.e. those at the master and Ph.d level, dedicate their "careers" to usually that one specific area of study. What are the statistics on those who achieve one master's degree or Ph.d, how many of those choose to pursue another? And how many of those use their degrees in truly interdisciplinary research?
No one said that the division of labor would always indefinitely remain indispensable--indeed we have reached the point where soon all of our "labors" will be completely automated, where Westerners will not have to engage in any physical activity to maintain their survival at all. We are already nearly at that point. The division of labor has produced a cornucopia, but at the same time it has stolen something essential from us--the instinctive need to survive. We have blunted, meddled, contracpted, aborted, liberated the instinct to survive. Lest us never forget, we are as much a primate as any other primate alive today, domesticated or not, because that is what we have become. Domesticated, overcivilized, and unwilling to do the things necessary to preserve our common civilization. Much as it pains me to do so, France is a member of Western civilization. What better way to expose French hypocrisy than to offer a Marine division to help win back each of those "little Fallujahs" that pockmark the French landscape? What better way to make them see the unreality that they have been living? These acts of vandalism which constitute nothing more than abject abhorrence of the law and the concept of civil society should be met with exactly the kind of force that only a full Marine division can bring to bear against such reprobates. How would the French public respond to a public offer from the President of the United States to the President of France to give whatever military support necessary to thwart this beginning that could end quickly or build to something much, much worse. The worst would be France ceding control of those areas that are Muslim to Muslim authorities and setting the stage for the end of France as a Western nation-state. The best, Chirac mobilizes the Army and begins shooting on sight anyone doing anything that violates the provisions of curfew and the normal law and order expectations of a civil society.
Can we expect any other European country to stand up to this latest threat to Western civilization when none of them value the civilization that we have built? Can we expect the EU to bring it's Common Defense Force or whatever its called into action to preserve law and order? Can we expect anything but more of Noonan's feeling that the wheels have come off the trolley, or perhaps we should get used to the idea that things are indeed broken, that we cannot just put the trolley back on the tracks and keep going, that we might have to sacrifice something of the comfort that our ancestors earned for us, how blissfully unaware they were that it was the very fact that they had to work for whatever they had in order to appreciate it that made them great and that makes us merely dwarfs standing on the backs of giants. It makes all of our vaunted technological prowess seem as vaccuous as the vaunted singularity that approaches will lead us to be, for what is it to possess life if one no longer hears its music? If the sublime fails to touch you in some small way, seeing first light at dawn, feeling the vast abundance that the division of labor within nature produced long before humanity ever conceived of language or humanity itself and knowing that there is something there, there is some greater meaning than just being masters of the moment. That if we truly do believe in a culture of life that it is our responsibility to build nobler goals than sales pitches and Sunday brunch with your Sunday best and Wednesday night bible study--to believe something is not enough anymore, we must do it. We must understand that the only logical conclusion of a culture of life is the recognition that spreading humanity and life, life in our image, culture and belief systems, must be our penultimate goal. That again, we can do little to change a culture's mind whose penultimate goal is the destruction of all other religions and the incorporation of all people of planet Earth into the umma and a permanent static existence that they would gladly force upon everyone, just as they trying to force it upon the people of France this very day.
It becomes my belief more and more each day that we cannot defeat an enemy that we will not call out in name, that we cannot win a war in which we continue to trade with known enemies, that we cannot ever hope to proclaim victory if we do not first declare war. And that unfortunately, we may not be able to pacify an enemy who believes they are the only truly spiritual people on the planet, that they and they alone possess the truth, and that that truth is laid down in one book. Remember how dangerous Western civilization was when people believed that the only truth that existed was contained in the Bible? Truth flows not from an authority, but from experience, in the cumulative experiences of the billions of people who lived on this planet that tonight continues its present course and speed. Ahead at roughly one half impulse Mr. Sulu.
Friday, October 21, 2005
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
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.
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.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
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!
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!
Saturday, September 24, 2005
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
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.
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.
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