the image age

I have spent the better part of the past several months doing exactly what I said that I was going to do: I listened. I listened and sought out across the entire spectrum of the internet all of the opinions, idea, concepts, complaints, conundrums, mysteries, allusions, problems, quandaries, oddities, eccentricities, coincidences...you get the point. I watched as much of the web as I could and just observed. The patterns. The what is here and what is there and who is saying what and how loud and how long and where and to whom and who published this and that...again, you get the point.
The problem is that there is so much to read. There is so much to absorb and if you do how to catalog it and organize it and find a starting point, a place where we can at least identify the key log.
Individual human endeavor continues relatively unabated in this strange new age we are in. The Image Age. What matters is what we see, how often we see it, what context we see in it and what we appear to be is more important than what we actually are. There are many who revolt against this ingrained belief but they do so without realizing it. It's part of the key log: we are in a jam and no one even knows that the river is blocked--the logs continue to build, not having reached the mill no one realizes it. As far as the eye can see all anyone can see is essentially clear horizons; even though we acknowledge the few storm clouds, we see them, we, as a society, accept them. Part of life. Pat Buchanan writing today the essential realist/paleocon argument against intervention in the Middle East in the name of the war on terror: the fear that an uninformed electorate there will quickly place Islamist parties in power and expand the jihad, rather than diminish it. This is a legitimate argument and ought to be considered but it ignores the reality that we are there. When the Romans wrote England off, how long was it before Hadrian's wall was completely abandoned (despite an abortive attempt to actually build a wall further north)? I ask the question that has continued to haunt me: do Americans want to remain a Great Power? Or are we satisfied to just be another state among states, neither superior or better, that the freedom we enjoin to every adult man and woman, the privileges we bestow upon our children, the security of old age, that these things are not good things and that we should not be proud of them?
It seems nonsensical to have to suggest that we should not be afraid of what we have achieved in America. But we are. And we are ashamed of it, we are ashamed that we have it so much better than the rest of the world, we are ashamed the way that it seems to me many wealthy people are ashamed of their wealth, despite maintaining a lifestyle that seems at odds with every moral sentiment they express--again, the Image Age, where the pronouncements you make are far more valuable than what you actually do. And nothing is more important in the Image Age than maintaining the illusion of perpetual youth. Have you seen Dick Clark or Bob Barker--they both appear as if they haven't aged a day in the past thirty years. It's terrifying, to think that perhaps Futurama had it right when civilization would face the perpetually animated head of all the major celebrities of the 20th and 21st century. But this desire for perpetual physical youth is only a symptom of the larger desire for the permanence of the status quo. No change. The United Nations is the most corrupt institution ever created, where two thirds of the declaration approved by the General Assembly concern Israel and its' aggression against the Palestinians or other peoples of the Middle East, UN peacekeepers engage in all manner of unspeakable actions, the Oil for food scandal has been buried by the MSM but all told it encompassed more than ten years and billions upon billions of bribes and illicit trade--all this, but no, the UN must stay. Or perhaps NATO, a defense organization that is essentially incapable of independent action because the council structure gives each nation a vote and all nations must agree. Thus, in Afghanistan the bulk of the actual fighting force is really only America, the British, the Canadians, the Aussies, and the Dutch. The other 20 some odd members won't allow their troops to be placed in situations that might actually require them to fire their weapons. But should NATO be dissolved and a new organization built around action, not deterrence, nope. The list goes on and on: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, a hole host of corrupt NGO's, the illusion of the nation-state in the Islamist world--we want the way we remembered the world to stay exactly the way that it is, and we are unwilling to face facts: images change.
But the Image Age won't end when everyone stops buying anti-wrinkle creams and hair transplants and soon total organectomy (a future surgery whereby all your internal organs are replaced with new ones, you're vascular and lymphatic systems are thoroughly cleaned and your brain is upgraded with both the latest software and hardware and you are then placed in hibernation for six months to allow your body to heal and you wake up 22 again). The Image Age will come to an end when the American people accept the mantle that history has thrust upon them, time and time again, whether it be to liberate ourselves from British tyranny, to the forging of a nation through Manifest Destiny, abolitionism, suffrage for all adult citizens, regardless of gender or ethnicity...we may not have achieved it all at once, we may have taken longer than necessary, but we're here right now and I like what we've done. I hate what we're doing to it. I hate that everything has become political. I hate that unfortunately for America, historically it has taken a great big wallop for the country to unify and act. And that's where the key log comes in.
I, as many people have, mistook the acquisition of information as the equivalent of the creation of information. Absorption is only part of it--the part that I didn't get was interaction. I still have a hard time with it, going to someone else's blog and posting a comment, emailing my favorite bloggers or writers in general and asking them to take a look...I haven't posted here for months, what would they see when they got here? Thoughtful commentary? Or the same old tired hawkish position on the war on terror...aren't we all so tired of it. Six years now. Can't it just end?
All I can hear are children screaming in the car, "Are we there yet?" They probably don't do that anymore, now that they're hypnotized with DVD players and ritalin. Part of the key log is finding a way to show the Left that they have the most to lose by unconsciously allying (and perhaps some consciously allying with the Islamists. But to the Left this is anathema--the enemy is clearly George Bush and the Republicans--perhaps someone was right over at the Corner that the only way to get the Left onboard is to make sure that they win it all in 2008 and they can see the seriousness of what we face--although that may be as bad as electing Jimmy Carter to office again--if Hillary could be as vicious to the jihadis as she is to her political enemies then this war would be over before you could say, the First, snicker, Gentleman. I doubt that she can though, and that's part of the problem of the Image Age, too. There's no sense of proportion, no sorting, no marginalism, no trade offs.
If I had an olive branch to offer one third of the country I would gladly do so, if only to find a way out of this mess together so that we can argue about all those bicycle paths you all want to build later and whether or not we should build hundreds of bird killing wind power stations and so on and so forth. But just put it aside for a moment, a brief flicker in not just the span of human affairs, but in our own lives. Come together on the one issue that matters the most, our survival. And do it so that we can have those arguments, so that we can enjoy the rush of the political atmosphere, the electricity on election night, so we can continue to practice this great experiment in representative democracy that we ought to proudly call our Republic. Put down the Image Age, and join me in the Age of....

what matters is what we see, not what is

The image. The video clip. The soundbite. We have reduced our world to a digital shadow of its' formal self, and what's worse, we have elevated the meaningless to the paramount--were but Nero alive he would laugh and find our little circus to be but the democratization of Rome--we are all free to be little Nero's in our own little world, masters of our moment and fixated on its' maintenance. Nothing matters nearly as much as the equilibrium, the status quo, the illusion that nothing changes. We plant lawn grass for houses on the beach for crying out loud! We build communities right on the water and wonder why hurricanes and tropical storms cause so much damage. We manufacture items to last a few years, cell phones for example, and while I understand that we're undergoing a rapid increase in the rate of technological development, items should be huilt to last. My sister's 1990 Volvo 240 has for instance 250,000 miles on it and it will keep running as long as someone maintains it. But, to look at it, it isn't anything to look at--the reality is though that car is fantastically well built.

somebody should be reading...

Mostly I write for catharsis. My own personal catharsis. Not release, not to open up to the world, not because I think that there's any real effective way to change much of anything anymore and as a consequence I'm not really that bothered by it. I mean, actually, I'm really quite bothered by it and still can't find a way to express it in any meaningful way. Although I do find it interesting that the inventor of the neutron bomb was punished by his mother in a rather odd way--she forced him to eat soap and gave him enemas, which of course, made him throw-up and have diarrhea (and you know what, I'm sure there's some better way to spell that but I really just don't care right now) and he invented a weapon that when put into action would cause exactly those kinds of symptoms in its victims before they succumbed to the radiation. Now, netiquette, as Andrew Sullivan would lead us to believe, should prompt me to give you a link, his name, and at least one cross reference and maybe I should also go post comments all over the place about how awesome this post that I just wrote was and maybe somebody should link to it and then yay! somebody is reading my blog. I hate netiquette. If I feel the need to provide a link, then I will, but mostly the process of accumulating links is about as tedious as filling out any form in triplicate. In the same way that the vanity of myspace permeates the music world, so too does the utter inanity of the post/comment process only reinforce whatever the reader already believes. We live now is self-contained spheres of thought and information--whereas before, Before Blogs, BB, I like that, everyone had access to much the same information. We shared the experience. And now, every pissed off liberal living in Amerika thinks that Buschitler is the worst thing since Richard Nixon and we are faced with the very real threat of balkanization, of the United States splintering into multiple self-contained factions, each with their own memes, their own beliefs, their own historiers, each fighting against each other, each unable to see that our strength is our common belief in the imperfectibility of man and the reality that we need each other, now more than ever. I think of my own family, split politically, and thus split in actuality, living in two separate worlds that never intersect.
I think of the reality that we can't win if we can't wake up and realize we're in a war. And what can one man do, what can one man do in the face of such, ambiguity, such shameless inattention to the fact that life can quickly descend into the short, brutish, Hobbesian nightmare that we have never had to experience. In fact, we relish in this absence of fear by exploring it through our postmodern obsession with apocalyptic scenarios (Terminator, The Matrix, even Harry Potter is a sort of battle between good and evil in an end of the world sense, and of course, Lord of the Rings, which if you're a liberal and you've seen it and you can't find the right parallels bewteen Tolkien's work and today, move!) yet we are so totally unprepared for even the mildest of emergencies.
But we are on the very brink of an apocalyptic scenario: say Israel finds Iranian Revolutionary Guard units acting in collusion with Syran agents in southern Lebanon providing Hizbullah with material, logistical and leadership support, the United States provides Syria and Iran with a timetable for ending their support of Hizbullah and Iran says forget about it. Granted, Assad the younger might blink, but the madmen of Iran won't. They've been waiting for this moment for too long to miss an opportunity such as this--the Iranians are devious--why let such a valuable asset like Hizbullah go to waste for nothing?
Indeed, why? Iran has nurtured Hizbullah for the better part of the past twenty years, and since Shiite's in Lebanon are politically underrepresented despite nearly constituting a majority of the population it would be ridiculous for Iran to allow what would eventually become a friendly sharia abiding satellite expire prematurely.
This leads me to the following: the Iranians are either about to test a small scale nuclear weapon and basically follow the US's own lead as it did during World War II when we told the Japanese that we could continue using nuclear weapons on their cities unless they surrendered or, and this is the more probable option, they are trying to test the operational capacities of Hizbullah and Hamas against Israel and see Israel's response and of course, how long the "international community" allows Israel's response to continue. It would be interesting to see how the "international community"would try and stop Israel if Israel were to prove uncooperative in cease-fire arrangements.
Let us not have any illusions about what faces us: open confrontation with Iran. Syria's association as Iran's proxy won't last the first two days of conflict with us. Hizbullah and Hamas wouldn't survive either. Of course, all of this ignores the fact that what we are dealing with now is not Sunni Wahhibism, rather, Shiite extremism. Never mind that the basic disagreement between the two is over whether only members of the Prophet's family can rule or not, but the phenomenon of Islamofascism is not isolated, it is across the board. Only Sufis appear to be immune. The train bombings in India, as in Madrid and the attack in London all Muslims. Ask Israel. They know. What we as a civilization don't want to believe is that for them, for the Islamofascists, this is as much about pride now as it faith. It really has sort of veered swiftly away from the religious component and has embraced an arrogant and simplisitic form of cultural pride that goes beyond superiority--it has wandered into the realm of the insane, and clearly, any religion that forces free men and women to submit to a theocracy would lead to insanity because the demands of such a system are so contrary to human reality. Never perscribe, always describe. That's a rule I have that I try to follow. Sort of like where life can exist, life will exist. Or, it doesn't matter that you don't want. That's irrelevant. Sorry, I'm trying to sum up my sayings.
The only way to beat somebody who thinks they are better than you is by stomping them into the ground. If they really are better than you, they'll win. But free men and women will always triump over the statist and theocratically oppressed peoples. Which is why we should view the recent events in southern Lebanon as an opportunity. An opportunity to finish off the largest sponsor of terrorism in the world: Iran. And it is an opportunity that will not last.
Ahead one quarter impulse.

like a festering sore......

The talking continues unabated. Talking, talking, talking....feelsl like a gaggle of girls, did you know that's what you call a group of girls, a gaggle. Like a flock. But a gaggle.
The self-perpetuation of the commentary crowd continues unabated. Have you seen townhall.com lately? I suppose that ultimately we have to wait until November for all this to stop for but a few short months before the Presidential race in '08 begins. If only I could work for Rudolph Guiliani. Regardless as to the outcome, my life would be complete. I could go on and abandon civilization and find some nice island in the Pacific. Ahhhhh......
What happens in the next several months will be extremely interesting....of course, what's happening now in the world is fairly interesting...modestly interesting at least. Okay, so soccer is the most boring game ever invented. The ought to just have the shoot outs the whole game that way we don't have to watch them run around the field for an hour passing the ball back and forth. Dull. Alright so Mexican elections are about as fun as listening to Joe Biden talk about how you have to be an Indian-American to walk into a 7-11. We all knew it was going to be close. Have you not noticed that virtually every nation-state that has a representative government has had a really, really, really close election in the past several years? Let's see..United States, check...actually we had a succession of close elections, Bill Clinton won the 1996 election with 49% of the popular vote, George W won the 2000 election with 48% and 51% in 2004. Germany had a close election recently, with the CDU holding only a few seats more than the SPD. The last British election resulted in a lopsided majority forLabor because of the way that the British allocate seats, but it was a relatively clsoe election with the Tories only a few percentage points behind. Italy had a nailbitingly close election just a few weeks ago. Interesting isn't it, that at exactly the moment we need decisive action we find that our chosen form of government isn't cutting the mustard. At the very moment we need leadership we find vacillation. We find that even the revolutionary leaders, such as the President and even Osama himself are tied to their parochial vision of humanity, a vision that lies trapped in the postindustrial void of deconstructionism-what's worse, is that most of the world is unaware how much we are faterd to failure, fated to fail because our intellectuals paved the way for our collapse. We are no better. We aren't noble. We aren't good, in fact, we're actually evil. Is it no wonder that some 40 million people watch American Idol, to watch mediocrity publicly displayed, when Chuck Barris was indeed the millenarian prophet of the television age and that maybe, just maybe, we ought to consider that there is something to be said about a nation that graduates more degrees in the leisure industry than engineering...what an age in which we live. Anyone can publish anything they want online. Anyone. I could go to townhall and start a hundred different blogs tonight and talk about nothing for the rest of my life. I could assert fallacious and inopportune ideas that no one really wants to talk about, like why we can't make our traffic lights synchronous. Seems pretty simple, synchronous lights. Yes. Or paying for only the shows you want to watch. Or being spared the incessant rampant advertising that pervades our every day existence and that you have to make an effort to avoid in almost any form, whether you're watching television, listening to the radio, surfing the web, driving down the road. There's a billboard going down into Atlanta on I-75 that says simply "I pooted." Now if that's not evidence of communist infiltration in the ad departments of every, wait, what was that, oh that's right, sorry, not communist infiltration, alien, no, not alien either? Well, will somebody please tell me what is was, oh yes, Islamist infilitration of every advertising department in the country. We will subvert your culture, by showing you women dressed in scantily clad outfits to drive the impoverished Muslisms of the world into hissy fits over cartoons. Sounds about right right? A bunch of imans who have applied to work in the Coke and McDonald's ad departments, what about a Prophet doll someone suggests? Yes, yes and we can have him date Barbie only then to have Ken steal Mohammed away from Barbie and have evil homosexual relations. Yes, yes, relations.
And what about the state of our relations? Is there actually a cohesive block that we can call collectively the West anymore? Does it exist, or does it only exist in outposts, like the monasteries of Ireland in 8th and 9th centuries, protecting the knowledge that the West has accumulated but apparently is no longer in need of. The knowledge that people, are animals and that if we fail to civilize and teach how to learn as children that they will spend their lives as servants, servants unto masters they are unaware of. Servants, as the netroots community is, to their own foolish visions of their own perfectability. Servants, as the uninformed are to the whims of the learned and the desires of the powerful. Servants unto others who are not interested in their well-being, only in the part they play, like poor Cindy Sheehan. You must first find pity for those who still think communism was good idea. We must find ways to forgive our brothers and our sisters for their ignorance, for their bigotry, and I mean our brothers and sisters on the left, those very people whose lives have been enhanced by the policies of center right governments in this country for most of the past quarter century. We must find a way to end this pitiful 51/48 split and push it into a comfortable 55-45 or 58-42. A place where the winner can speak with some authority. Where our gang is big enough to make the nutroots completely irrelevant. My prediction for the next three and half months: watch while the Democrats implode and the President starts to find his course again. And then watch while the media try to explain yet another GOP victory. The cries of stolen election, fradulent voting, blacks intimidated will reach a fever pitch, but it will be the cigarette smokers who lead the way, and show those health nazis what's up. Maybe it will be more interesting. We'll see.

everybody just shut up

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...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?

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.

all this whining and moaning...

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

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

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

contemplating some changes...

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

the shot heard round the Sphere...

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