“The Americans own the watches, but we have all the time.” A Taliban saying.
Philip Zimbardo argues in the video below that for many in the West, the future has ceased to exist. It is no longer worth saving for, planning against or dreaming of. All that we have is an addiction to instant gratification. Yet despite the fact that experiences are intensified into the present with all the compression of a car crash, the resulting moments become far from being satisfying; paradoxically unbearable, cloying and sickeningly rich. We rush and once we get to where we were hurrying, can hardly wait to leave it. Life becomes and endless series of novelties, each palliated by the next. We entertain ourselves to forget our last entertainments.
Yet even the smallest pauses between them are irksome for no reason we can think of. The mere minute it takes for a computer to boot up makes us rage. Yet when the welcome screen comes, it fills us with annoyance. What we were rushing to reach is revealed as vapid and commonplace. We don’t even stop to see the bright colors; we can’t even see the magic that’s taken hundreds of man hours to program; we can’t wait to get past it, and past what comes right after.
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Cowboy commenting at the Belmont Club, astutely observed that more and more of our magnificent technology was aimed at achieving nothing but going faster for the sake of going faster. But as to where we’re headed, who cares? Everyone knows there’s no place to go.
The hard fact is this: we’re doing less, and with better tools. Charles Murray has tried to quantify this problem in his book, “Human Achievement”. Contrary to your predictions, Walt, Murray claims that the 1800s were the high-point for the rate of human progress. Understand something here folks, this is not to say that progress stopped in the 1800’s, we’re talking about derivatives here, the calculus of human progress. The rate of human progress seems to have peaked before the last century in measurable ways. Yeah, we got cell phones that run circles around UNIVAC. But we use them to vote on American Idol. So, in many, many ways, the situation is not improved.
The situation has not improved because progress needs a future; it requires a sense of the transcendant. Our marvelous modern culture has singularly destroyed the allure of the future even as technology gave us the means to get there. But when the future is perceived as futile, empty and meaningless there is no point getting there. If you asked a teenager why he stayed glued to videogames the more honest might answer, “so that I don’t have to think about how horrible and senseless my life is.” The one word that seems closest to describing the hopeless frenzy of a present in which the future no longer beckons is the quality of being jaded.
The Taliban’s belief that they “have all the time” is paradoxically an assertion that they, unlike us, believe in a future. They are convinced that someday the flag of Islam will fly over the White House. Modern PC culture by contrast, constantly hints by its actions that it has very little desire to even survive. For all its self-congratulation it can hardly muster the enthusiasm to continue. Children and grandchildren, which are the links into posterity are seen as an irksome encumbrance. Our bridges to tomorrow are not just untrodden, they are unwanted. The Optimum Population Trust, for example, argues that a world without many people would be very desirable. We like ourselves so much we can hardly wait to be rid of us. Children are not treasures; they are fungus on the planet. And if we’ve burdened them with debts, well they deserve it. In the West the future is a place to where we can safely kick cans because in some fundamental way we believe it no longer really exists. Why not dump everything, our deficits included, into a tomorrow that will ever come? And if it does, well we do not care about it.
Instead of a future filled with our dreams we have a great restlessness that reflects itself not just in personal behavior but even in public policy. The current administration’s frantic desire to exit from Afghanistan is driven less by a desire to achieve victory — by definition a future event that requires posterity to appreciate — but in part from a psychological desire to avoid present unpleasantness. We exit with the same impatience with which we wait for computers to boot; not because we want to do anything after it does but because nothing should take so long. The difference between the confidence of China and India exhibit and pessimism of the West can be expressed in one phrase: the Chinese and Indian time continuum is still complete. They still have parents and they still want to have children. At some point in the fairly recent past the West gave up on legacy and posterity and longed for a time when it could forget both God and Country; to have done with both self and meaning.
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
Yet perhaps Lennon’s words more closely describe a prison than paradise. When ideology abolishes transcendence the first thing it does is close off borders to anywhere it doesn’t control. Ideologies which provide “complete solutions” to the human experience find they must shut off the frontier to any sehnsucht, or place of longing, lest people find the desire to look over the next hill and thereby begin to ask questions. They lock everything into the present. But the future is an important country, one which human beings cannot easily live without.
Until the advent of the all-powerful state one of the most important threads in Western culture had been the direct relationship between man and transcendence. If man could know the truth without inter-mediation, receive liberty outside of human agencies it was on the basis of his citizenship in a “far off country”. He was not bound to the circles of the present. It was this greater citizenship that gave his future substance, a dimension beyond the merely animal and made the idea of “the pursuit of happiness” a serious goal. CS Lewis described this far country in his essay Weight of Glory.
it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience … our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
That is of course, seditious talk, because progressive politics is above all about controlling our ideas of time; it was about abolishing the future and confining us to the present. It is about telescoping the future into its present incarnation. “I have seen the future and it works … He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future”. But all they are are different ways of saying ‘this and nothing more.’ And we will always be something more. It is humanity’s birthright and curse.
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What a great essay, W! I mean the part I read; I didn’t have time to read it all. . .
Philip Zimbardo is a socialist activist— no longer on campus, he led a campaign to ban Condi Rice from Stanford and Rumsfeld from Hoover.
His earlier research on ” torture” has been discredited in part because he was having an affair with his research assistant who was “compiling” the results.
The Taliban is a culture of tribe, land, revenge, honor and religion–in that priority.
If you visit C S Lewis grave off Quarry Road in Oxford and the pub where he met with Tolkien and crew in Oxford you get picture.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
John Lennon ” started out on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff”
His “rakes progress” from hash and beer to heroin and coke was a mess.
After all the killing the peace with Islam will come down to the common value of Charity.
Blood and Soil is the false promise of a future.
“I have seen the future and it works … He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future”
What a hackneyed lie. I don’t know who first dreamed up that load of BS but it is false. You cannot control the past. You can misrepresent it. Telling lies about the past is not the same as controlling it.
With a lot of effort and even more luck, one might control the present, but that is doubtful. ALL conflict arises from different parties attempting to control the present. The future can be affected but not controlled.
I have jumped on this bit of propaganda before and never found anyone that could put forth evidence to support the claim.
Then again, there are those that think the earth is flat and the moon landing was shot in Hollywood. They also are immune to the concept of evidence.
As far as Afghanistan and the WOT, The Muslims cannot win. We can lose by quitting but I doubt that will happen. There is a greater chance of goping postal on them. It is hard to claim victory from the bottom of a glowing crater.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-10/tom-donilon-and-obamas-war-with-the-pentagon/
The radikkal left is getting desperate, both about the Obomination and the WOT. They are trying to define winning as something impossible. A futile effort to control the present through propaganda. Propaganda is amusing but it doesn’t last long when faced with an Abrams MBT. Just ask Baghdad Bob how that works.
If Hitler was still around you could ask him how propaganda worked against those B-17′s. All the propaganda in the world won’t change the fact that the USA is hunting down Terrorist leaders with robotic weapons. The terrorists are not hunting down US leaders. They are running and hiding.
So who is winning?
It will be interesting to watch and see if the Terrorists and their western supporters will be able to stop the targeted assassination campaign with propaganda. I doubt it.
The Palestinians murder their children in the name of Allah and take pleasure in it, because for them, death is preferable. They cannot see that the next generation is better off actually living. The West feels the same way. That is why they so often identify with the Palestinians.
All of the world’s value is at their feet, waiting like clay to be shaped into something, yet they’d rather rage. The West seems to have gotten past the rage. It is worse for doing so. Are the dead still jealous of the living here?
The rolling sands stretch into time
The beck’ning hills in distance wait
The sea spray flecks the beach with rime
The runner listens to his gait
Beyond the hills he knows not what
He only knows that he must go
He leaves his house, his home, his hut
And why it is he does not know
Much wearied now he claims the crest
Before him lies the promised land
In distance beck’ning hills still rest
The future filled with rolling sand
He presses on still, undeterred
For duty binds him close with steel
He sees the radiance unblurred
And knows the sand and hills unreal
A testing of his faith and worth
A trial that lasts as long as he
Is bound to sky and sun and earth
And rolling sand and restless sea
But in the end the runner knows
That one last hill, last stretch of sand
Will see him as the new sun rose
With God as all along He planned
“When ideology abolishes transcendence the first thing it does is close off borders to anywhere it doesn’t control. ”
–
Is this the reason the nihilists amongst our betters don’t care about illegal immigration and inundation by islamists?
Do they just want to be left alone to play by/with themselves and then die?
If there is no hope for a better future and the present seems too bleak maybe we should just send in the clowns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_in_the_Clowns
Hatred and the Culture of Death are happy bed fellows with the devil and have been for many thousands of years.
We have to deter or kill those who want to kill us and we honor our warriors in that fight—but how does it end?
That is the General Petraeus question–how does it end?
Sounds like immanentizing the eschaton.
On a cheerier note: if you want to get off your plum duff and do something about the election, try this link to Ace of Spades: they’re doing a “meatspace” Get Out the Vote effort.
http://minx.cc/?post=306755
Think geometrical progression. . . . And remember, the Dims have the unions; we have ourselves. Veni, vidi, vici!
Speaking of time, Barney Frank in his debate with Sean Bielat comes across as yesterday’s man. The particular combination of glibness, intimidation and experience that allowed him to sneer at opponents had no noticeable effect on Bielat. Barney came off as slow, nervous, and over.
You know, Wretchard, I wonder if you write like this all the time. I mean, if you make a grocery list, I would half expect fascinating musings on the consumer culture, grocery store marketing strategy, the difference between Filipino and Australian grocery stores, and how this relates to the common values of the West.
You always write something intellectually stimulating, after all.
Dr. Zimbardo is one the world’s most virulent determinists, with a world-view that sees everything human as futile and everything non-human as mechanistic trudgery. That’s not to say that the West in not in decline–it is, as Murray and Kennedy and others have noted–but it is to say that the dark pessimism of Dr. Zimbardo is entirely in keeping with his notorious world-view skewing his research. One needs knee-boots to read any of his books.
So, with the decline of the West is Islam ascendent? Not likely. No culture which celebrates homicidal/suicide (‘duocide’) as the highest form of civic virtue is likely to step into the moral void and loss of futurism left by the end of Western modernity and the negativity of post-modernism. Plus, Islam is still very much in its 800-year long period of intellectual stagnation, as every annual UN Arab Develoment Report records.
What does the future offer to a people obsessed with obtaining the narcotic of James’s “craving for appreciation”? More freedom, or less? Greater prosperity, or greater subsidization? Relativism, or absolutism? Isn’t it entirely likely that a people self-trained to substitute rewarding helplessness instead of assisting helplessness–all in the name of what is ‘progressive’–will eventually adopt totalitarianism voluntarily?
We have on the planet an antidote to the moral collapse of the West and the intellectual stagnation of Islam: Confucius, and his social code of improvability. Let’s not give up hope; let’s not close the door to a brighter future. Let’s adopt the thoroughly modern philosophy of ‘improvability’ as the replacement to the demise of modernity.
Woven through the many essays Wretchard has posted to Belmont Club are several very insightful themes. This is one of the most insightful.
In some sense, maybe the dream of the future died when it became a pure fantasy which was obviously unachievable. Any competent manager knows that setting high but achievable goals is a good motivational tool and the team, even if they fall short, will probably achieve more than if they’d had meager goals. But setting patently unachievable goals is demotivating, since the boss obviously can’t be serious about it.
Somewhere in the last fifty years we, as a society, stopped being practical and stopped thinking about what was the best we could achieve and instead starting thinking about what would be, like, so totally awesome and far-out, man. The Science Fiction of rocket ships and exploration has been replaced by mystics wielding a supernatural “force” and seven foot tall blue-skinned ersatz-Iroquois living in primitive peace on a gaia-like planet.
Imagine. Yeah. Imagine this. Imagine today you went to work and built something useful. And tomorrow you went to work again and tried to do it even better. Imagine no possessions? A few more years of this economy and I can imagine that all too easily. Imagine all the daydreamers getting off their asses and learning a useful skill instead of hectoring the rest of us to make their dreams come true already. I’ll give John Lennon this much – he was right that he wasn’t the only dreamer, and too damn bad about that. His generation of day-dreamers snoozed through the alarm clock and didn’t make it to work on time. Now the rest of us have a mess to clean up.
But I’m an optimist – a bitter one sometimes, but still an optimist. John Lennon would’ve turned 70 this year. His generation still has damage left to do, but their days are numbered and they will pass from the scene. Tyyye-ayyy-ya-yame ain’t on their side anymore.
It was not that Kennedy was a great president, not that he was especially bright nor even, at least early on, politically astute. What Kennedy did, whether by design or by accident, was to present his country with an achievable and apparently desirable future. (We will, within this decade, put a man on the moon.) It was not the goal itself, we won’t know for a maybe a hundred years whether that was worthwhile, it was the unity of purpose, self respect and the belonging.
Apparently the lessons of the past are quickly forgotten.
When I first heard “Imagine” all those years ago I was immediately struck by the melancholy beneath the outwardly inspiring text. Only much later did I realize that it came from the underlying resignation of the message. There is something utterly oriental and fatalistic about JL’s famous song. Striving is useless. Just pass the roach around boys and when it’s over, it’s over. All we are is dust in the wind. A hundred and thirty years before, the public mood was different. Popular poets like Tennyson shouted their civilization’s defiance to the winds.
The optimism, indeed recklessness of 1833 is in marked contrast to the passive acceptance of futility of the 1960s. We think of the 1960s as the Age of Daring. In fact, it was the Time of Retirment. The received wisdom holds that what came between these two attitudes were the two World Wars. After 300 million dead nobody wanted to smite the furrows any more. And if they ever found the Great Achilles his martial virtues would be far too disturbing for their taste. The Cold War brought forth a whole new crop of ambiguous heroes who wondered whether there was even any point to winning; if winning was not half so dirty as losing. And so there was an end to the heroic age.
It was ironical, not in the least because much of disillusionment came not on the heels of the failure of classical Western civilization, but from the failed strivings of its nihilistic cults. The 20th century is the story of totalitarianism’s ruined attempts at global perfection. But what the received wisdom fails to explain is why other civilizations, with even more traumatic experiences, never lost their taste for success. China suffered; Russia suffered almost as much. Certainly the Islamic world has never stopped suffering. But none of this has dulled their appetite for tomorrow. Yet however that may be, the curious lassitude that has fallen on Western confidence is worrisome. Tennyson looked out from that window long before Lennon did:
That is a lot better than “Imagine”; the difference is that he approaches the melancholy with dread, while Lennon embraces it with both arms.
chrisvj…
The moon project was ideologically stolen from Johnson…
It was presented because Kennedy had screwed up on just about everything you could point to.
It was a low point in his foreign policy — to date.
At every level, Kennedy was a foreign policy disaster.
His memory is entirely warped because of his good looks and his shocking death.
The more that fades, the more it is apparent that:
His father absolutely bought him the 1960 election by paying off the Chicago mob. The bag-lady/ gun moll gave death bed testimony: she carried the funds! Now she’s depicted in HBO’s series on Sinatra.
Yeah, this moll tried to screw every man from DiMaggio on over. Sinatra had her number. He protected Joe.
Anyhow, it was Not the Daley machine that stuffed the ballot boxes — it was the crime boss!
Everyone smelled a rat, November 8, 1960, Nixon absolutely. He graciously gave the loser the White House — there was no Al Gore in him.
Had the FBI investigated, the whole scam would have blown up very quickly. After all, using the crime boss’ favorite moll as the bag lady! How tough would she be to figure for Hoover?
Naturally, Hoover detested the Kennedys. He knew that they were scum. On its face the election was stolen. Joe had a criminal career that went back to birth. His pro-isolationist WWII position is of record.
But like Soros, their funding was astounding. Adjusted for inflation — Joe was a multi-billionaire $4,000,000,000 in todays bucks! He owned the mob.
We also know, now, of Hoover’s sexual baggage. Well, Kennedy and the mob knew of it decades ago. Hence, Hoover’s extreme reluctance to chase the mob. Robert F. Kennedy must have been in the know: he wound Hoover into a twist by investigating Hoover’s protected ‘friends.’
In all of Hoover’s days, no one in Washington was willing to comment on his right-hand-man living right next door and never leaving Hoover’s side. Such a power couple.
That Kennedy NEVER is associated with the Vietnam debacle, nor the Berlin Wall, nor the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs in the popular remembrance is a tribute tot the propaganda arms of CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and the ‘super’ press: NYT, WP et. al.
Our political history is as contaminated as ‘Soviet History’ — ‘Nazi History’– and the rest of bunkum talking….
ONLY when Clinton was up against the ropes did ABC release a devastating documentary WRT Kennedy. The jist was that a drug-addicted whore-addicted President who made astounding errors in judgement so bad that he had to call upon his predecessor to gain international gravitas proved that a lying useless Democrat in the White House was not only consistent with Democrat principles, but that nothing the worse would come from it — Vietnam excepted.
That they had been sitting on the Kennedy story for decade upon decade only became apparent at that moment.
If you visit C S Lewis grave off Quarry Road in Oxford and the pub where he met with Tolkien and crew in Oxford you get picture.
I made only two touristy stops on my one and only trip to the UK, made for the purpose of getting dosed with Lariam on the way to Africa. The first was to the Eagle and the Child pub, where CS Lewis and Tolkien met to discuss literary stuff. The other was to 221B Baker Street where Dr. Moriarty once visited Sherlock Holmes. What time remained was spent walking among the Dreaming Spires of Oxford. The one indubitable fact is that sandwiches in Cambridge, Mass are much, much better than in Oxford in the Thames Valley.
We rush and once we get to where we were hurrying, can hardly wait to leave it. Life becomes and endless series of novelties, each palliated by the next. We entertain ourselves to forget out last entertainments.
The odd thing about our age is how few people leverage its affluence and time-saving machinery to actually lead more coherent, satisfying lives. Multiple marriages and broken families, health problems, a taste for degraded entertainment – these have all become choices, and they come to people in all walks of life and of all political outlooks. Or maybe choices is too strong. Perhaps they are the hook hidden beneath the bait of owning and enjoying what fads and advertising tell us is the best life has to offer.
I often find myself sympatico with Progressives’ (spoken) disgust with the down-side of materialism.
Er, I find John Lennon’s Imagine rather inspirational.
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
If religion is the only reason that people have to get up in the morning, if their only reason to turn off ‘reality’ TV is because some make-believe fantasy tells them, then humanity really is doomed.
But being able to live in the knowledge that there is nothing out there is trully inspirational.
The Taliban is wrong – they don’t have infinite time because modernity will catch them too.
And then there is always fashion. I’ve often thought that fashion explains so much of the West. “No future” is a fashion. It will pass, but hopefully not replaced by those “full with passionate intensity”.
ADE
ADE — #19
…being able to live in the knowledge that there is nothing out there is trully inspirational.
Er, I think I know where you’re coming from, ADE, but I also think those words don’t mean what you think they do. No one has “knowledge” that “there is nothing out there,” they just have faith. “Inspirational” can also mean deciding that you can do whatever you want, because you’ve become your own godhead.
And, er, – Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too, Imagine all the people, Living life in peace — People kill for lots of things other than traditional “religion.” They kill for resources (Or more prosaically, in heroin-addict John Lennon’s case, they kill to get money because they are junkies and who don’t receive John’s kind of royalties.) They kill for ideologies like Communism. In fact, a good argument can be made that in the 20th century, the rejection of traditional religious principles opened the floodgates to genocide and mass murder.
Wretchard wrote:
“That is of course, seditious talk, because progressive politics is above all about controlling our ideas of time; it was about abolishing the future and confining us to the present.”
True, but the most insidious thing about the left controlling time has been, since the French Revolution, the abolition of the past.
The left has always been about creating “year zero”, a conceit where all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the past can be tossed aside. A rejection and destruction of all that humanity has done previously, in order to have utopia now. A rewrite of history. The narrative is that while those ideas were good for people 100 years ago, something new has come along, the cognoscenti of the present are far smarter and wiser than any other humans who have ever lived, and they have found a way to change the basic qualities of human nature by government fiat to make a perfect world.
This is the pattern that keeps repeating itself and has for over two hundred years. Taking out the present and future is just a bonus for them.
Impressive intellectual horsepower here. My mother said it best 50 years ago ” turn off the tv and go outside “.
ADE #19
More people were killed by atheist regimes in the 20th century than died in all the religious conflicts in history combined, many times over.
The idea of religion as the greatest evil may suit the Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ of the world, but the theory doesn’t stand up to exposure to facts.
As many of us have written here before, religious societies can be good or bad, but atheist ones are universally bad. Not just states, either. Any organization will become less free and less tolerant as its membership becomes more atheist. There are no counterexamples. Exhibit A is the education industry in the West.
Does this mean there aren’t any nice, decent atheist persons? Of course not. But for reasons any of us can guess at, groups of atheists spell bad stuff for those who don’t choose that way.
You can end up thinking that if you’re going to have “a future” you need to detach and become self-sufficient. Have land, grow food. Tend your herds. But that there’s hippy talk!
Salt
You are correct. I should have used “able to live with the belief“.
But I didn’t say that JL was a prophet. There will certainly be much to kill and die for over the next few years, and very little of the killing will be for resources.
ADE
“….abolishing the future and confining us to the present.”
That explains why all the cars from Commie countries look like they were designed in 1952!
Communism, Socialism and most of the other ‘isms are fixed codices. As a sort of revealed religion they cannot admit of any flaw or variant interpetation (notice the falling out between the Russian and Chinese versions of Communism when the Chinese decided to adapt the credo to their own culture – so much for the World Wide Worker’s Movement). Everything must always remain “just so” because, of course, once you have perfected humanity any change is a degradation, a flaw, a lessening and thus cannot be tolerated.
This also explains the crumbling will of the Ruling Class, the closer they get to their point of (self-defined) perfection the closer they get to the point of having no further purpose. There is only the urge to keep everything fixed and unchanged, to keep time in a bottle, to try to prolong their all too lengthy adolescence. Like a model railroad builder, once you are finished there is nothing left to do but sit and look at it.
But there are others of us out here who have a vision of a future that IS better and who strive toward it. Undeterred by the mad ramblings of the effete Ruling Class we have families and work to raise our children to be better than we are, to do better than we have and to lead happier lives, come what may. When the last of the drug-besotted, spittle-lipped, tie-dyed T-shirt wearing HippieBoomer finally dies and relieves the world of that burden my kids will be free to move onward and upward.
End note;
I have nothing against the members of the Boomers who did something with their lives, many have, it is just that far too large a portion of that group seems to have been infected with an outlook that combines all the worst aspects of totalitarianism with a need to feel righteous about the “goodness” that they have inflicted on others. If you are a member of the first group please do not feel offended by my rant, it was not aimed at you; but you probably knew that already.
There is that hill in Brittany
I’ve never known nor never will–
Yet know so well as thirst, as need;
Or the coming bend behind
The darkly foliaged road,
The flat line of disappearing sea,
The distance misted tops of far off hills;
Always always, anywhere, horizon,
Toward which I’ve turned
Yet have not reached.
Strongest in youth, not yet lost–
Longing.
In longing there is direction–
Forward.
W: But when the future is perceived as futile, empty and meaningless there is no point getting there. If you asked a teenager why he stayed glued to videogames the more honest might answer, “so that I don’t have to think about how horrible and senseless my life is.” The one word that seems closest to describing the hopeless frenzy of a present in which the future no longer beckons is the quality of being jaded.
“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”
What advantage does man have in all his work
Which he does under the sun?
A generation goes and a generation comes,
But the earth remains forever.
Also, the sun rises and the sun sets;
And hastening to its place it rises there again.
Blowing toward the south,
Then turning toward the north,
The wind continues swirling along;
And on its circular courses the wind returns.
All the rivers flow into the sea,
Yet the sea is not full.
To the place where the rivers flow,
There they flow again.
All things are wearisome;
Man is not able to tell it.
The eye is not satisfied with seeing,
Nor is the ear filled with hearing.
That which has been is that which will be,
And that which has been done is that which will be done.
So there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one might say,
“See this, it is new”?
Already it has existed for ages
Which were before us.
There is no remembrance of earlier things;
And also of the later things which will occur,
There will be for them no remembrance
Among those who will come later still. – Ecclesiastes 1:1-11
@ 28 RWR
Your quote is only from the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, when the author is beginning to look at the meaning of living. By the end of the book, he finds the true reason.
Ecc 12: 13 Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the whole duty of man.
14 For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.
The Declaration of Independence:
But what is happiness? And why are we endowed with the right to its pursuit but not IT itself?
Blaise Pascal, a genius scientist and mathematician, considered man’s states in his “Pensees.”
It seems man is forever searching. Perhaps life is a quest for redemption and meaning and as Wretchard’s CS Lewis quote alludes, we are compelled in this search by the faintest memory of what once was and the faintest glimmer of what will be. It’s enough to make one seriously consider that man may be a fallen creature.
Taliban does not have the time they think they do, such is the conceit and miscalculation of those in such desperate circumstances, bent on petty material gain, such as the drug trade they use to finance their efforts, and complete with the same kinds of brothels, used by imperial japanese soldiers in their time.
They won’t be so smug when a revenge cycle comes full complete circle on them and their saudi abetters, and remains until it has finished.
Ez. 25:17
Wretchard: As you may know, the profoundest theology (I refer to the Confessions of St. Augustine and the Church Dogmatics of Karl Barth) include substantial discourses on Time: God’s time and our time; not just time but eternity. I think you have hit upon the reason this is so.
I wonder what brought about the change between Tennyson and Lennon. Of course, as in other large historical movements, it is probably a case of many things in confluence, but the one that keeps recurring to me is this: we decided to spend our inheritance, earned in WWII, rather than reinvest it. For a decade and a half, this attitude may have been forgivable; after all, our parents (I mean the generation born in the 1920s) had been through serious privations, and many had never come back. By 1960 everybody seems to have forgotten that the party must end before it turns into a simple debauch.
Others have made this mistake before us. The best example where I live are called Californios, former citizens of Mexico, fabulously wealthy in land after the transition to statehood, now the subject matter for romance, who decided to continue the fandango beyond all sense. Only a few (Vallejo is probably the most notable exception) kept their wits about them during the transition. The results we see around us today, spiced with the resentment of their descendents. (Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, University of California Press, 1966.)
The temptation is simply too great for many, and by 1960 we had another engine to drive the whole juggernaut: a TV advertising industry driving consumerism to unprecedented momentum. Now that is seen as something to cultivate, as the key to recovery [?!]. I suspect C.S. Lewis would be weeping in his beer.
Maybe I read it here that one of the problems of bureaucracy is that it rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence. This is the same side of the coin as the phenomena that your essay discusses. True technological and scientific advance is about a real future, and a keen appreciation of how it may differ from the past. That the left has to have bureaucracy is a reflection of its lack of a future – The fantasies that are the entirety of its “philosophy” are the purest magical thinking, because they have to be. The global warming blather about tipping points, sea level rise, increased cyclonic energy, alternative energy sources such as solar and wind are, of course, based not only not on actual science, but on anti-science. That has to be their program, because the future is intrinsically unknowable and uncontrollable, and science not only knows that but, embraces it. That is a lesson of Karl Popper, and the moral of the story for C.S. Lewis. The left has to be about now at the expense of the future because it is about control today for the sake of control. The Obama Pelosi regime may or may not know that the green boondoggles of wind, solar, etc. can’t work, but they don’t care. The real program is to take control of you and your money – today. Likewise, when they have your money, it has to support the bureaucratic society, because that is also about … today, in strict opposition to the future. The institutional mediocrity (at best) that characterizes public administration today is what the left has to have. Real excellence is counter to the program, because it may provide for a real future. The ponzi schemes that are social security and the myriad of other smaller public pension plans which were hatched to placate the denizens of the various bureaucracies aren’t hard to see through. They never were. A ponzi scheme is a fantasy from the outset. But they were necessary to the project of taking and maintaining power today. At state and local levels much of the current knowledgeable insider debate is about whether government pension plans should be “defined benefit,” (which almost all are now) or “defined contribution.” What a fortuitous way of putting the problem. Of course the bureaucratic state had to offer its minions defined benefits, even though we see that most of those benefits can’t be paid. But at least they are defined now. What they said was, give us your money, and we will define your future as rosy, so you don’t have to worry your pretty little head. Nevermind that man behind the curtain, that he is broke, that his promises are worthless. The corruption in federal, state and local pension plan accounting is just a tool to steal the future and to cement the left’s current hold on power. Look at the hostility to democracy that underlies the views of all leftists. The facist (in the Hegelian sense) type has to be anti-democratic, because people who vote freely are unpredictable, and therefore threaten the project.
Imagine always struck me as depressing and whiny, admittedly I was a hard-rock fan and that Brit stuff was old and self-important to my veiw. The problem with Lennon, and the ethos that he is a figurehead for, is that they had become famous and thus decided that they were therefore important; that they had something to say that we “needed to listen to”.
This issue continues to this day, does anybody really think that the likes of Rosie O’Donnell or Oprah are actually better prepared to understand an issue than the average Joe or Jane? What sort of expertise does a music star or movie actor have that I should listen to what they have to say? There is far greater wisdom in the comments section here than you could find in years worth of television. The infatuation with the shallow and transient harms us greatly. Like a narcotic it numbs the pain but does not cure the wound.
Say what you will about the injustices of the old “Muscular Christianity” of the 1800s, it did more to help people than the damp, cold, withered hand of Postmodernism ever has. The first prerequisite of accomplishment is the confidence to undertake the task.
TWIMC–regular paragraph breaks make your posting much, much easier to read . . . and more likely to be read. On this site, 4-6 lines seems pretty good.
This is the second time this week that I have seen the Taliban and John Lennon mentioned in the same place.
The first was in a comment on a progressive websight in an article about the war in Afghanistan.
The post was advocationing US withdrawal as a sort of tribute to the John Lennon leagacy on his birthday, to ‘give peace a chance’.
I was struck by the sheer perverse irony of abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban as a sort of tribute to a famous musician.
I pointed out that under the Taliban all music, instruments, and recordings were forbidden on pain of death or worse.
The progressives just shrugged as if they did not even understand the point and continued along the usual line about how we must know our limits and scale ever downwards in ideals and accomplishment. Maybe they knew what the walrus meant better than I did.
The Taliban have energy which American progressives can only latch onto, which is why the liberal websites usually admire them as freedom fighters and liberators from hegemony, but the goals are no different. They both desire a joyless sunless world properly outfitted in sackcloth for the grim business of living.
I’d not ever thought of “Imagine” as a conscious warning before, Wretchard. My estimation of Lennon would have to rise.
It would sure be nice if we got back to imposing schedules on the enemy instead of ourselves.
August 7th, 1945 we say to the Japanese “We have just bombed the city of Horoshima with a terrible new weapon that makes use of the energies that drive the Sun. And if you don’t surrender in the next 24 hours we are giving up and going home.”
What is amazing is just how badly the Left seems to fear the corrections of the very problems they see as all consuming. “They lose; we win.” was unthinkable in the Cold War. And each new suggestion of how to replace Social Secuirty or Medicaid with something better is denounced as horrible.
They have seen the future and it might just work. So they have to put a stop to that threat and maintain the present situation at all costs.
We once agreed that this much was self-evident: Our Creator endowed each of us with an unalienable right to life (without which the rest would be pointless), liberty (id.), and the pursuit of happiness. Pursuit requires that there be a future state of being to be pursued, and that the effort toward achieving self-realization could well be its own reward, even if ultimately unsuccessful when measured by others.
Those narcissists who are capable only of life in the “now” are simply incapable of seeing beyond their own pathetic limitations and therefore unwilling to challenge themselves with a tomorrow, for their own benefit and for the benefit of their society. How sad they are. How meaningless they make their own existence.
I dunno, if you listen to most any lefty tell you what he wants and you take him seriously, you’d think it was a warning. Barack Obama told us what he wanted before the election after all. Spread the wealth around. Problem is too many voters thought “oh, that’s just rhetoric, red meat for the fringe. He doesn’t really mean it.” We’d all be better off if we took what lefties said seriously. They do mean it. That’s what makes the 10:10 Red Button video so disturbing. If you’re going to raise your estimation of John Lennon based on Imagine, then you have to extend the same courtesy to the folks who made that video.
Hmm. I’ve speculated about a genetic mutuation that happened recently and hasn’t spread through all of humanity yet. Those without it are stuck in a hunter-gatherer mindset with a minimal grasp of the future. They don’t contemplate trying to change it much. They just migrate back and forth, consuming what they can find and trusting their future to pure fate.
Another indicator that it’s the Left who are the unevolved troglodytes.
Au contraire! (Marie can correct my spelling I hope) Once you’ve finished, you remodel the house to get a bigger train room and expand the layout.
Lennon’s “Imagine” is born of sheer boredom with life, seeking instead to recline on bean bag chairs, with hash-pipe in hand, and dream about a Rodney King Utopia where we all “just get along.”
Cowboy is right, “The rate of human progress seems to have peaked before the last century in measurable ways. Yeah, we got cell phones that run circles around UNIVAC. But we use them to vote on American Idol.”
Our knowledge today, for all its genuine achievements, does not lead us anywhere. Aquinas was the last encyclopedic mind. Since his time, and especially ours, no one can study every subject, nor even know everything about a single subject. And yet, from a lifetime of listening to many teachers, I have hardly heard even a whisper in universities of a “truth” or “good” that can satisfy the heart and mind.
But what is pursued in our universities? What is our learning directed toward? What is it supposed to lead to? – to helping direct people towards getting good jobs? or bringing greater equality between people of different races or economic backgrounds?
Boredom, disappointment and anxiety have come upon us because we have jettisoned pursuing “the good”, “the beautiful”, “the truth” and tried everything else instead. Alas, we have come up empty. We seek only “stimulation”…be it a hashpipe, or American Idol, or a video game. Imagine that!
My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water. – Jeremiah 2:13
One thing that separates us from the animals (or our predecessors) is our ability to plan (I’m talking the individual here), itself possible only through a willingness to put off gratification.
It is fitting that one progressive ideal is fewer people – the last century has clearly shown how murderous collectivist programs are – by intent. Haven’t we learned anything? The 20th century began with Einstein’s (who turned down his shot as a head of state) incredible theories and closed with Algore at the top of the heap of “settled” knowledge, full of fame, fortune and power (well, except maybe for a hanging chad or two, or despite same…) Some integrity (intellectual or otherwise) is necessary.
Isn’t the (our current) Age of Idiocy, which includes the “post-modern” view, really a rejection of modernity, a reactionary impulse? Radical Islam and progressive true believers are maybe not such strange bedfellows after all – they embody the hate whose name you dare not speak.
40. JMH
“Au contraire! (Marie can correct my spelling I hope) Once you’ve finished, you remodel the house to get a bigger train room and expand the layout.”
You believe in a future and make plans, the Left would not allow such things! Once their version (perversion) of “perfection” is reached they would not allow things such as the dreaded remodeling and expansion. Think of the carbon footprint! Think of the chance that your child or grandchild may find happiness in this project!
Better that our heads all explode than disturb the finite perfection of their vision.
BTW; I wasn’t slamming RR modellers it was just the first image of a closed, finite system that came to mind. My parents would not allow me to tunnel through the basement wall to expand my layout so mine became limited and eventually I lost interest, I discovered the fairer sex about the same time so RR modelling really didn’t have a chance!
Wretchard #15
I agree that the 60s were the retirement of modernism. Its basic ideas, working their way through civilization since the enlightenment, had flowered, produced seed, and were moving into the dying stage.
In an earlier time, the West would have succumbed, ultimately infertile, to the Muslim horde. “Imagine” what would have happened had the media elites continued to hold their one-time hegemony over cultural memes: the darkness, which is nonetheless palpable, would have been unstoppable and inevitable.
Our last technological burst, while maybe not as earth-shattering to the physical world as those of the 1800s, has nonetheless brought about something interesting to me. The existential/epistemological longings that Spengler (rightly) says are the soil of new civilizations, have sped up, too. While much of society may have no more use for their amazing cell phones than to vote for American Idols, they aren’t the only ones who get to use the technology. That applies equally to the terrorist triggering bombs with them and the philosopher, perhaps as yet unborn, who will coin the basic ideas that will propel the next great civilization, the son of the West.
RWE…
For psychological reasons the wording was that “we’ve captured the power of the Sun.”
We were, after all, dealing with the land of the rising Sun.
In Shintoism, the Emperor controls the rising of the Sun.
If that sounds like the Pharoah hauling the Sun around Earths under belly, so be it.
——
The great bulk of humanity fears any change. It’s the sheep in them.
There is also the ‘not invented here’ syndrome. A perfect example of this was the rejection of a clock by the Peking Court upon its presentation by the British. I rather suspect that that was the moment when the aphorism was uttered.
——
In a prior life I spent my days educating and training — on the job training it was.
Bettering their skills made me a very unpopular man. When ones technical knowledge consistently exceeds a veteran workman bitter resentment and rage soon bubble up. Very often knowledge transfer devolves into psychological dramas WRT dependency/counter-dependency and self-ego/self-respect. Rodney Dangerfield is everywhere.
When you take a Leftist down the road towards rationality, history, consequences and game theory — well, you’ve just stomped on a dream.
Virtually to a person, Leftists suffer from Magical Thinking. The Resident is a classic case. He not only Magically thinks he Magically speaks. Pure talk has carried him to reign over the nation. Work, not so much.
BTW, for Leftists work and talk are synonymous. Hillary is a queen example. Upon inspection, one cannot find a truly productive day in her life. Instead we have her narcissism as a ‘public good.’ The Resident, perceptive enough, has parked her with a title and enough apparent importance to keep her in the manner in which she feels entitled: the ultimate feminine drone.
Both the Resident and the SoS have staggering levels of entitlement centered in their psyches, it being self-evident to them that their magical thinking is of the very best quality and that their role is to rule.
—–
As for the Pashto…
Based upon the famous cover photo of the National Geographic, time runs very fast for them. One becomes an old crone before the age of thirty. The dudes with the long white beards are in their early fifties and yet look like they’re ninety.
—–
The ISI is apparently bitterly opposed to the completion of the ‘ring road’ — particularly now that the last leg will join Kabul to the northern route. How revealing. Obviously, completion will permit ever more of ISAF supplies to come at a lower cost out of the north.
As for the campaign…
Bill Roggio reports a drumbeat of fatalities within the opfor officer ranks, If it weren’t for the general haplessness of the Afghani population it would all be over. The issue now is Islamabad. She is addicted to jihad.
“Cowboy commenting at the Belmont Club, astutely observed that more and more of our magnificent technology was aimed at achieving nothing but going faster for the sake of going faster. But as to where we’re headed, who cares? Everyone knows there’s no place to go.”
unfortunately, that ‘s right ! in the world directed by bankster, there is no left alternative for dreamers
a video is making the buzz amid the french Net, Cantona a former soccer player that used to be a “rebel” but is nonetheless , a sensitive person, said that if the good popole in stead of manifesting were going at their village bank and take off all their savings, things would change, the elite would be forced to hear the voice of the “humbles”
http://www.bu2z.com/video/revolution-selon-cantona.html
The world is too much with us.
I’d say more, if I was not lost in angst.
I have not kept up with Dr. Zimbardo, I’ll let it go at that.
Regarding the Taliban, the Americans have all the Predators, but the Taliban has all the targets. Works for me.
Payoff seen in Afghan surge
Taliban demoralized and changing sides, military says
By Rowan Scarborough
The Washington Times
8:32 p.m., Monday, October 11, 2010
Wretchard,
Something doesn’t square up. Zimbardo’s film identifies the “Protestant” nations (including France and northern Italy??) as the future-time oriented cultures of Europe, and “Catholic” countries like Sicily (and Greece??) as the present-time oriented cultures.
And then you say that “The situation has not improved because progress needs a future”.
Er, what? It’s precisely the future-oriented cultures that have the worst demographic numbers and the greatest cultural decay. Southern Italy is having babies; it’s future-oriented northern Italy that’s imploding. Can you imagine the sort of raves occuring in Stockholm happening in growing cities around the developing world? Of course not; all the young women are at home with infants.
I would say that progress has stalled because people became too future-time oriented. They looked at the future and saw … nothing new. They believe America will fall because that’s what happens to every Empire; so let’s get it over with already. In the mean time, pass the roach.
It’s future-time orientation that creates a sense of inevitability and powerlessness. But hey, I know, maybe if we erase history and start over from Day Zero we’ll get a different result this time! Break the cycle, man! …
I think both progress and happiness need more present-time orientation. The appreciation of the now; the flow of action and skill. Zen teaches this explicity. Americans who want to work eight days a week probably aren’t thinking about the present at all, but about some imaginary future where they’re retired, have the condo in Florida, and can finally relax. Maybe if they just focused on enjoying the day to day rythmns of life, family, etc. they wouldn’t have such screwed up priorities.
Imagine a future. That’s what motivates a good portion of the Tea Party who see what legacy is being created for their children and grand children of unending debt bondage. They see a future created by ‘best and brightest’ and reject its implication of virtual economic serfdom. So some people believe there is a future and one worth fighting for and its not the future of the present ruling class.
THE REIGN OF THE NEUROTICS
One manifestation of postmodernism is the fact that social policy is being steered and dominated by what was once known as neurotic and socially maladjusted behavior. The overemphasis on mass “physical health” as if we were livestock or an army; the extremely low levels of particulate matter that the EPA insists on, the judicial/bureaucratic weighing in favor of same frakkin’ “minnow” over a farm valley’s need for water; the demand that sugary drinks be banned from food stamp allotments; pushing smokers to the margins even though they are a source of tax revenue; asbestos hysteria; powerline and cellphone induced “health problems” hysteria; the ridiculous ease with which people take offense, to the point that they’ve created a grievance industry; the perversion of the precautionary principle that gives us Cap & Trade instigated by what is looking more and more like an outright fraud.
There was a time when the behaviors that drive all this nonsense would have been pushed to the social edges as an annoyance and a distraction. Now we are run by such people: malevolent enuchs with their pathological obsessions, embodied by such snivelers as Mayor Bloomberg, a man who bought himself a third term to govern a once proud and muscular and very American city.
imho the big theme of the first half of the 21st century will be the colonization of the deserts of the earth as the cost of delivered water 1000 miles inland to any desert …collapses.
The big theme of the second half of the 21st century or maybe starting as early as 2040 — will be the colonization of the moon and beyond.
The distances to be traveled in the future are a function of the accelerated pace of things today.
I don’t think that it was a coincidence that Martin Luther posted his 95 thesis on the door of the church in Worms in 1917 and two years later Hernando Cortez kicked down the door to the Aztecs. That age marks many similarities to our own, in astronomy, in technology. The Gutenberg press maps over pretty well onto the internet as a world changing communications tool. Copernicus was only beginning to overturn Ptolomy. Today we are in equally momentous paradigm shifts of really unknown size & scope. (After all, what is dark matter or dark energy.) The high water mark of Islam for that age in Europe came in 1532 at the gates of vienna. Perhaps in +-2132 we will see a similar high water mark. There is no evidence of it currently just as there is no Luther but we shall see.
Already there is a split between those who live in the future and those who live in the past. Just as we who live here in the New World were anticipated centuries ago by people in the Old World when they made their journeys across wild oceans on wooden boats that sailed the wind and regularly killed half the crew and passengers.
Thomas Jefferson was asked about 1809 or a couple years after Lewis and Clark came back from the west coast — how long it would take the settle America out to the west coast. He estimated 5000 years and 200 generations. It took 100 years and 5 generations. Why was he so far off? He didn’t anticipate the industrial revolution principally– of the 1830′s –that brought in the railroad–and in the 1850′s the telegraph. The railroad overturned the canal system of the eastern seabord. The canal technology is at least 5000 years old.
Today when one technology overturns an older tech–the older one is no more than 50 years old. So in this sense the industrial revolution of the 1830′s was the biggest. Nevertheless the industrial and scientific revolution we are going through today is still pretty big.
Wretchard @ 15:
“When I first heard “Imagine” all those years ago I was immediately struck by the melancholy beneath the outwardly inspiring text.”
I’ve always found the shear empty headedness of “Imagine” to be irritating. However the western world is in Lennon’s debt for the song “Revolution”. Back in 1968, the whole Gramscian agitprop thing was becoming a real threat to the western world. Then “The Beatles” through the song “Revolution” basically said that radical communism wasn’t cool. That single act knocked Gramscian agitprop back a decade and allowed us the time for the Soviet Union to implode.
Thomas Jefferson was asked about 1809 or a couple years after Lewis and Clark came back from the west coast — how long it would take the settle America out to the west coast. He estimated 5000 years and 200 generations. It took 100 years and 5 generations.
Rather less than 100 years, might even argue 50.
And the main factor he failed to consider was the American entrepreneurial spirit, and the pull of the frontier (not to mention the gold rush!), including pulling more immigrants all the way from Europe.
Though no doubt the railroad helped too!
Interesting alternate histories, where there was no railroad, and maybe where the Indians were not devasted by smallpox and alcohol, indeed even where there was no gold rush. The Spanish might have held the west coast, unless the Russians maintained a hold on the north, and the Indians (sic) might have had time to adjust, put up more of a fight, and maintained something like equal status.
(all occurring after the Louisiana Purchase, so we still count out the French!)
I wouldn’t call “Imagine” a vision of prison. I would call it a vision of Hell.
Of course we have a future. The question is whether we will create that future or whether we will let somebody else not only create it but put us into their vision.
One key to victory is to make sure the enemy feels he has no future. He is induced to ask himself “how does it end” when the answer is obvious. He who desires a quick end can always blow his brains out. He who desires victory over his enemy needs to be more patient. Every war is “unwinnable” until it is won. Any war can be lost if one desires defeat rather than victory.
Of course we can defeat the Taliban. The problem is that it’s a bit more difficult to obtain victory or even think clearly when certain defeatists shout a constant refrain of “ARE WE THERE YET? ARE WE THERE YET? ARE WE THERE YET? ARE WE THERE YET?” Good grief. Some people think that if they can’t get victory with a snap of their fingers, it’s time to give up and sell one’s allies down the river. Such people don’t have friends and don’t deserve friends either.
Wretchard, I just finished rereading the your essay and I have but one quibble; I am of the impression that you are geting too much noise from our coastlines mixed with the signal. In the harried cities perched perilously close to salt water the denizens seem to have time for nothing and distractions and amusements aplenty. Flyover country is rather calmer.
Here in the heartland it is possible to lead a life with a steady purpose, an easy pace and a happy demeanor (no it isn’t paradise, but it sure beats NYC). If my computer takes a few moments to boot I care little, I allow sufficient time for my daily commute during which I listen to CDs of classical music, the pace is more relaxed overall. Tribulations occur but they are not unexpected and are dealt with to the best of our abilities.
Despite the fact that my wife and I both work all five our children have grow up to be happy, productive members of society. It was a lot of work, but work with a purpose and a lot of joy as well.
Recently we gathered all of the family together, five generations in all. Reaching back nearly a century and (hopefully, as my grandaughter is two years old) reaching forward nearly a century as well. Summing up all our ages there was nearly a millenium of life there. Joy, sorrow, triumph, defeat, wealth and poverty all tumbled together in one happy mess.
Time is a river and we only get to swim a short portion of it, yet we can hear the tales of the people that dove in at an earlier point and we try to prepare our children for their passage downstream as we must let go at the end of our turn.
We have all the time in the world, too many just don’t bother to notice it as it creeps silently past.
Josh…
Read ‘Polk’, the biography.
Polk, the ultimate Jacksonian, was extremely concerned that Britain was lusting after the Pacific Northwest and perhaps hooking up with Texas.
He launched the Mexican-American war to resolve the southern border — determined to get to Califonia.
He negotiated for Puget Sound, which London really wanted to hang onto, and got it. That getting was linked to our Army’s performance in Mexico.
Polk managed to get to the 49th parallel all the way to the Pacific by granting the Hudson’s Bay Company unrestricted access to the Columbia River. With the passage of time, this proviso became void due to the company’s own legal charter.
Jefferson was a terrific intellect, but not so hot on exponentials.
—-
Charles, Dark Matter and Dark Energy are diametrically opposed fudges covering up measurement errors and providing an endless opportunity for NSF grants.
The need for Dark Matter collapses when the source for galactic angular momentum is its own hyper-black hole.
The need for Dark Energy collapses with Dark Matter AND adjusting the size of the Universe downward. The extreme red shift detected from the earliest hyper-black holes is over-amped by their gravitational wells. The radiation is coming from the ring just outside the event horizon — which is where the light can’t escape at all. How severe a red shift would you expect, then?
Since we ASSUME that a high red shift means further back in time and further away, it also causes us to jack up the energy emitted because of the inverse square rule for common radiation.
The result is that we’re left with a model that doesn’t fit. We need to create new fundamental forces or find entirely new hidden particles that solely exist to repair our equations. They won’t be found.
May-be we can talk of a “lost paradize” like for Adam & Eva, when work ment something. Nowadays if you ask people if they like what they do, almost all would respond that they work for earning their life, but not that they like their work.
We used to be talk that the Bible paradize was where idleness was appreciated, fruits, candies, food, easy to get… and that it was a punishment to have been thrown out of such a paradize. Now people would say that they regret this time of “hard” work, of “small wages”…that they did bear for raising their children, but they liked their work, and were fidel to their enterprise. They were somebody. Today they have become an individual, interchangeable, that has no root, no marks, no border, he can travel, work no matter the country is situated, he doesn’t know his boss, he doesn’t know who to contradict, just that he goes where the biggest money stands.
Our civilisation is dying of this loss, that’s why the emerging nations are successful: they kept their roots and social barriers.
MC #59
Here in America (at least among those of us in the center/right) we have a saying – “the value of a paycheck is more than the cash”.
I suspect that there are people all over the world who understand the fundamental truth of this. But here in America, with its Calvinist underpinnings and frontier sensibilities, there has always been a special attachment to the concept. Your own de Tocqueville commented on this in his writings. Yes, it has eroded mightily since the 1930′s and especially since 1968. But as commenter #57 anton has accurately said, it is still a very strong underpinning for the basic worldview of Americans at all levels.
Does this dedication to work necessarily result in a loyalty only to employment and not the nation or to children or our civilization? Historically it has not meant that. It is therefore logical that something else, some other change new meme, is responsible for the changes you rightly critique.
Not just technological progress peaked long ago — the rate of human political progress surely peaked around 1787 and has been decreasing every since.
There are only two reasons to build this thing: the sheer joy of the undertaking and the challenge of a competitor. That gives me hope.
The New Bugatti: Waiting for Superman No More
Bugatti link
Lennon and his ilk celebrated (and some still are celebrating) their little Age of Aquarius, because they realize that they have finally evolved as high as humans could potentially reach…They are ‘thinkers’ and ‘light workers’. How can you strive to be anything more?
What more is there?
Sit back and enjoy the enlightenment!
…as does this…Start at 1:40.
a slender, golden thread to Heaven
…then, there is the value of legacy…
legacy
Then there’s this…
http://beatles.ncf.ca/deachman.html
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=beatles+revolution+documentary&aq=f
Here at the beginning I say to myself, “This might turn into a too-long post”. Apologies in advance if that becomes the case. Firstly, there’s the business of Murray’s claims and the question regarding an accurate perspective on our state today. My position is that Murray’s finding is true, although his analysis may not be. His finding is this: the apogee of human achievement so far has occurred somewhere in the 19th Century. Very broadly, Murray concludes that Thomism, meaning the school of thought founded by Thomas Aquinas, explains the explosion of intellectual development in the West.
Murray’s Thomistic explanation is an induction that may or may not be true. His finding that the rate of human progress peaked in the 1800′s is, however, a deduction derived at by employing common statistical methods. The heart of the method is influence tracing. For example, if you’ve ever searched on to a scholarly or professional website in which technical articles are published, or, in fact, ever done a Google search, the top results of your results are in no small part determined by how influential each individual result has been judged. Scholarly sites, as well as Google (which started out as a very scholarly site back in the day) page-rank the results the based on how many times the target page or article has been “linked” or “cited” by other pages or articles. Murray’s attempt to scan the whole history of human achievement, then, has been nothing less than an attempt to “Google” it and to derive observations about the results.
Refuting Murray’s deductive results requires that you find a flaw in the execution of his method or blow a hole in that method altogether. I’m not prepared to do any of that. I’ll cede him his findings in this regard. His question, “Who alive today will be studied 200 years from now?” is a haunting one I’ve been incapable of answering though it’s bugged me for decades now.
I recognize that how we interpret Murray’s results is a matter of open debate. For instance, one can argue that no small explanation for the decline in the rate of human achievement were the catastrophes of the 20th Century. Perhaps the next Issac Newton or Shakespeare wound up being machine-gun fodder at Verdun or Omaha Beach, or he became plasma one day in Hiroshima, or maybe he perished in some Gulag or purge. Perhapse global trauma has produced a sad chapter of a bump in the road.
Yet even this kind of explanation invites a vector towards the explanation that Murray in the end settled on. War and catastrophe are not new challenges for civilizations, but rather a monotonic feature. Plus, the 20th Century began with such great promise and increasing abundance for all. The nightmares that soon developed were all cultural, all animated by internal psychologies rather than any scarcity of resources or of potential. The big, blinking red arrow does point a cultural explanation both of what went right prior to the 19th Century and to what went wrong soon after.
One feature of human achievement is that most of it has happened at the hands of European males. That sentence I just wrote is an explosive statement that cannot be tolerated in today’s culture. But it is true because it is a fact. This is a truth that dare not say its name, so to speak! Yet that sentence grates the modern ear, the modern ear cannot allow itself to hear it. The fear has become engrained that to think such a thought passes judgment on non-European males. This thought is heresy. Yet, the fact remains that the lion’s share of human accomplishment did in fact occur at the hands of European males. The interesting question is why this historical fact is true.
I do not believe that European males are smarter , or more gifted, or have greater innate potential than non-European males or then females of any stripe. I am not a European male, either. I am a Texan, yee-haaw! This makes me an idiot obsessed with guns, whisky, wanted-signs, Bibles and barbeque in the eyes of every European male in Paris, France. What’s interesting is the modern attempt to reconcile the inconvenient historical truths to modern tastes. We enter the land of Jared Diamond and his “Guns, Germs and Steel” thesis and its derivatives which all explain the embarrassing success of the West in terms of a combination of pot luck and bald exploitation. This is really a tour de force for the Western modernist. We have accident (proximity to steel), ignorance (germs: European failure to understand how toxic they were as persons) , and hate (guns), and all this is to blame for how the West got ahead. It used is luck to cheat everybody else on the globe of their birthrights. This is one explanation of the West: the triumph of evil.
Murray offers a counter suggestion. The West’s success is the triumph of the good. Specifically, the Thomistic world view wedded, sanctified, and in fact _mandated_ pursuit of the true. Thomas codified concept of fides et ratio, i.e. that faith and reason cannot be in conflict. This is not to say that faith and reason should not be in conflict, this was boolean. Faith and reason CANNOT be in conflict. Faith AND Reason -> Truth, not sola fides, not sola ratio, not Faith OR Reason, not Faith XOR Reason. It was not just a green light for human accomplishment it was a mandate for it. They MUST go hand-in-hand. And everybody, the whole culture, got on board the magic bus into the prosaic promised future to find the Promised Land which flowed with milk & honey.
It is well known that starting in the latter half of the 19th Century the West descended into the Crisis in Belief. Here we find Matthew Arnold surveying Dover Beach, and that was only a shot over the bow. We’re in the age of sola ratio, I fear, folks. We’re in the mode to engineer the Promised Land ourselves. According to the Thomistic equation, this cannot be done. Reason cannot advance independently. You might argue that there’s no logical reason why this is so. And, if so, you’d be utilizing a sola ratio defense of sola ratio, i.e., a circular fallacy. I’d ask you to look about yourself. There’s a fides reason science cannot advance alone. It needs, as Wretchard so eloquently pointed out, a future. And I’d add also a family not only to support it along the way but to help provide that future.
I have concluded that ratio does indeed require fides, independently in this way from Murray. History seems to bear out these cogitations. The natural conclusion I draw, though it may be wrong and it is open for revision, is that the light is dying out in the West. Perhaps it is moving to the East. I don’t know the scale at which these things move. But the trend is that the West is growing increasingly incapable of supporting science, literature, and art. Human accomplishment is leaving her. For, I might add, the THIRD time (1200-800 BC Dark Ages, 600-1000 AD Dark Ages, and Now). Heh, The Third Anti-Reich! My belief is that we’re on the cusp of that very possibility, having become a ridiculous people who can’t sustain what’s been dropped in our laps. Again.
On the last thread, somebody, apologies, I forget who, mentioned a sci-fi story where people landed on a planet and found inhabitants who had abandoned the cities. They had advanced beyond that, regarding the cities as a primitive construct. I thought at first he was relating to a sci-fi story I remember, but also forget the title of, which was very similar. They landed and found the cities abandoned. The people in the hills had forgotten how to run them. Like Angora Wat, Macchu Picchu, Baraboudor, or, heck, Rome.
17. wretchard
You should have tried the Steak and Kidney Pie—or the Pudding
Wow, thanks Prof. Wretchard,
I always knew this was the Poetry Philosophy Writing class.
whoa! tomorrow that will ever come?
I wouldn’t be so bleak, humanity’s been through worse. Like weeds in a bad season, good survives.
Why shoot for wisdom when knowledge is so cheap?
blert @ 58: The British? Oh yeah, as in Canada. Forgot about that!
Cowboy @ 69: Victor Davis Hanson suggests its simply because the west got better at war. The next question would be, how did they get there, and it’d be a little tough to argue Thomism as the answer!
Because, y’know, when it comes right down to it, if it wasn’t the Brits in the 19th century and the Americans in the 20th, would we really be worrying about the triumph of the west? Not so much, I think. So what needs explaining is not exactly the West, but the Anglosphere.
And for that, I wonder if it isn’t more along the lines of English common law and culture, plus or minus Christianity, that made the formula. It suggests an organizational structure and modes of cooperation that seem unique in the world.
My two cents.
When you come right down to it, any sentient being with a foreknowledge of his own death is either motivated to achievement by a dry sense of humor or the intuition that he’s part of a game whose ends are not immediately discernible, but is worthwhile playing anyway. As Cardinal Newman put it:
“I can never be thrown away”. We make a difference. Or some other similar idea. Even if one were not a Christian or a “believer” in Newman’s sense, most would still need some equivalent motivation, a similar reason for going forward. For why should we risk ourselves to long journeys, endure danger, undertake great causes or head into the long dark spaces between the stars, but for the idea that it is somehow “worth it”? Not too long ago, there was a story about an Israeli security guard who grabbed a hold of a suicide bomber trying to enter a little supermarket, and by doing so, blew both himself and the bomber up. I remember asking myself: why? It couldn’t have been for whatever pittance of a salary he was getting.
What amount of money is it worth giving your life for? And yet we who live in daily safety, who proclaim the futility of all things from the housetops in our world-weary way, don’t we expect some guy in an airplane or in some infantry unit or in some steel tube at the bottom of the ocean to do just that? To risk his life and if need be, die for us? Even if we do not live by our own faith, we live by the faith of others.
When I think about why the guys, including the Communists, in my underground days died, there is no other answer but to say: for faith. They believed in what they were doing. They believed so much that they endured death, and in cases unspeakable torment. There is no underground, no serious endeavor, no battle against odds that can endure without some amount of faith.
Faith is probably as vital to human existence as food. The desire to see what is over the next hill, the next valley, the succeeding line of trees is fundamental to our survival skill set. Without it, our primitive ancestors would have never left the beach. They had to have some primitive form of faith to go inland and become us. To some extent, we owe it to them to live up to their trust. If they had the faith that in time resulted in us, homo sapiens, then how dare we say to that vast procession of ancestry: no your trust was in vain. I think you can conceive of faith in largely non-religious terms or at least as simply a propensity to gamble. To say “why not”? And go on. At all events we may luck out and amount to something. If we stay where we are unwilling and unable to move forward then in time our doom will come.
Unless we go forward, we will die. And that is of course the unstated desire of the Imagine universe. The Zardoz universe. The universe with Zeke Emmanuel at the end of it, and nothing more. James Elroy Flecker captured this drive to know which impells us all forward. Impels us with our “rotten shoes”, with our vague sense of destination, from out the gate into whatever befalls.
But Flecker also tells us what awaits those who cease to strive, for whom the pilgrimage is futile. The sands that wait to enfold us are soft and warm, but they are still a covering of dust.
Cowboy @ 69 — Interesting hypothesis. Is the “light dying out in the West”? Maybe — it has to happen someday. Why not now?
I was recently pointed towards Prof. Carroll Quigley’s 1961 book, “The Evolution of Civilizations”. Based on the many previous civilizations on which the sun has already set, Quigley identified something that Prof. Charles Handy more recently described as “the sigmoid curve”. Everything goes through a life cycle. Eventually, the initial instruments of expansion become the bureaucratized institutions of decline.
But the whole human race has kept moving forward. Maybe three steps forward and one back, but the direction is unmistakable. If we in the West fail to exorcise our own demons, that will be sad — but not the end of the story. Some day, some other people may look back to the lessons of the US and Australia to build their own shining city on a hill, just as the Founding Fathers looked back to the lessons of ancient Greek democracies.
No, Josh. VDH is quite hostile to the mere “better at war” argument. This is Jared Diamond’s argument, to which Hanson is bitterly opposed. Famously, Hanson challenged Diamond’s assertions asking, “Why are San Diego and Tijuana so different, then?” To which Diamond has no answer.
Hanson consistently demonstrates that military superiority in the ancient world (his specialty) is a cultural function. Hanson is a fan Murray’s work here.
Josh, realize that the Anglosphere did not arise out of nothing. It came from somewhere. Additionally, Murray’s project was not an attempt to describe which political systems worked best. English Common Law aside, the Italians didn’t have it. Yet, the Italians produced: Vergil, DiVinci, Gallileo, Michelangelo, Dante, Vivaldi, to scratch the surface. The fact that Englishmen are counted as Europeans (despite their hot protestations) is more of a causal explanation of their achievement than English Law is. Even though English Law might be the best legal form to come from Europe.
Wretchard at #75: don’t we expect some guy in an airplane or in some infantry unit or in some steel tube at the bottom of the ocean to do just that? To risk his life and if need be, die for us?
Speaking of courageous rescuers and steel tubes: here is a live stream video of the rescue of the Chilean miners:
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/LiveVideo.html?mod=e2tw
Viva Chile.
Bravo Cowboy! Reason + Faith leads to truth. And St. Thomas was indeed the ox (I think it was Chesterton who called him that) who pulled the cart to lead us there.
Don’t forget the amalgam of Athens + Jerusalem either. The uniqueness of the West is the product of the synergy between (speaking in metaphor) Plato + Abraham + Moses + Jesus with a pinch of Frances Bacon and a dollop of Newton.
Consider that the West has produced such creativity as Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Rembrandt, Dostoyevsky, Leonardo, Socrates, Augustine, Kant, Sophocles, Michelangelo, just to scratch the surface. Yet most school children scarcely know of, let alone appreciate these and their peers.
And then there are chemists, from Avogrado through Boyle to Krebs; physicists from Democritus through Galileo to Newton and on to Einstein; biologists from Aristotle through Vesalius to Mendel and then to Pasteur and on to Watson and Crick.
Can any civilization other than the Greco-Judeo-Christian boast such lists?
Faith + Reason leads to truth. Truth thrives under disciplined freedom. Truth produces beauty but not all beauty leads to truth or goodness.
********
And now another thought: Picture a digital watch. Then picture an analogue watch. With the first you get a picture solely of NOW. With the latter you get a picture of past, present, and future. This is a small glimpse at the diminution of the mind that organizes itself only digitally.
“Imagine” always struck me as Huxley’s “Brave New World” set to music.
Reading Wretchard’s post, I thought much could be summed up by refering to “2001: A Space Odyssey,” conceived ca. 1965, filmed 1967 and released 1968, iirc, promising a universe of unlimited potential. Less than a decade later, “Star Wars,” set not in “A galaxy far, far away,” but speaking to us of a heroic future. And in a minor key, the 1960′s Star Trek series.
Contrast with the disastrous 3 Star Wars prequels Lucas made 25-30 years later–no vision, nothing to stir the blood, just gimmickry and shallowness. And the preachy Start Trek successor shows, better than teh original in every technical respect, but almost unwatchably boring and formulaic and predictable.
The last person on the Moon was, what, 1973? Now, in a few months the US will not even have the ability to launch a perosn into low-earth orbit.
I also remember in teh late 1960s and 1970s research habitats on tehs ea floor, and the parallels that were drawn to space travel.
All that has vanished, now we worry about Medicare and funding an education system that already costs at least twice what it ought, and does a piss-poor job at that.
cowboy @ 77: One of us is pretty confused. VDH’s theme in a couple of his books, is to support the claim. I’m sure that’s not the whole story, I was explaining how it could not be, so I guess you saw something else VDH wrote – that maybe I didn’t – that extends the argument further.
We could each look for some citations, I guess.
Isn’t Diamond’s argument more about technology and war? VDH doesn’t make that linkage. But what that has to do with Tijuana, I can’t really guess. That the technology does not rule, I guess. But to repeat, technology is not VDH’s argument, he argue for the art and skill at war.
Josh, VDH consistently argues that military superiority is a cultural function.
Charles Murray, in a similar vein, argues that human accomplishment is a cultural function.
Jared Diamond, however, builds a case that culture itself is an accident, and generally a function of resource proximity and management.
This is to say, Diamond is a tailor-made authority on the the topic, and Murray and VDH are racist heretics. That’s the view from academe.
VDH very publically called Diamond to task and asked Diamond to explain why San Diego and Tijuana were so different given Diamond’s theories. According to Diamond’s theories, they should not have been that different. They are very close to each other, occupying a very similar set of natural resources. They also have never been at war. Tijuanans have also never died en masse because of a plague coming from San Diego. And so forth. They’re just neighboring cities whose only real difference is that one is American and one is Mexican. So, why is one so spectacular and the other such a disaster?
Diamond’s system cannot explain this. It’s an anomaly in his view of history. Meanwhile, Hanson and Murray will tell you in a New York Minute that the problem is largely cultural, and, if you really believe that all things are equal across races (which they in fact do), the only thing holding Tijuana back is its culture.
And so forth. And, I’m not really keen on discussing this point any further on this board. If you want to continue discussing it, we should move it to back channels.
Speaking of ignoring the past, today the mail brought a campaign flyer for my local (Democrat) State Assebmlyman, one Mr. Roger Goodman, Esq. Roger has been in office for two terms now (first won in 2006), and has risen to some minor leadership posts in the State Donkey party.
His flyer said “Elect Roger Goodman”. Not Re-elect Roger Goodman, but Elect him. As if he wasn’t already a two term incumbent.
Changed my mind. I don’t want to burden myself with backchannel convos. It’s all out there. Seek and find.
cowboy @ 83: VDH consistently argues that military superiority is a cultural function
Yes, that’s what I’ve been circling, but what I started out by saying is that VDH also credits the primacy of the west on that military superiority, not on moral superiority, or technological accident, or moral superiority.
Josh, that’s like saying a guy who started out poor and worked hard all his life, saving and investing wisely until he finally retired a rich man, is rich simply because he has lots of money, not because he worked hard.
I cannot compete with the depth of some of the previous arguments, but here goes:
Perhaps there is some inverse relationship between the consequence of when technology removes the need of a human ability to survive and the mind’s need to adapt and change with it’s surroundings. That is to say that to the extent that our minds are not required to innovate, question and deal with everyday problems for us to stay alive or to exist in some primal way, then our minds in a sense atrophy to that same extent. Or said another way, the further technology removes us from the primal need to solve problems to exist, the less inclined we are to have the ability to solve problems at all. Thus human achievement and innovation declines as technology does more and more of our daily tasks for us.
And a corollary. Faith to me is in some ways tied to the human need to question why we were put here. This act of questioning seems to diminish as the need for questioning as a part of solving problems to survive declines. Therefore, faith by that line of thinking, diminishes the more we are put in an environment where things are done for us and we do not need to think to survive.
I might add, for those who are interested in Diamond’s ideas, that the experience of the European Dutch totally explode the whole theory. As well as the Italian Venetians. Both were groups pushed back into the swamps, forgettable places. They came back. They figured out a way to conquer nature, and to prosper mightily. There’s no guns or steel in those swamps. Yet the Venetians built a mercantile empire that shaped Mediterranean trade for 500 years. And the tiny Dutch nation reached around the world to establish the gargantuan Indonesia (as wide as California to Maine) as a colony.
It USED to be possible to dial up a few searches on Jorge Borges and find the link I wanted to review regarding the questions you posed, Wretchard. Borges has a short story either in Labyrinths or Ficcionles that goes over the psychology of why an atheist Nazi assassin lusts to kill his mark, even though it will spell his own doom. I can’t tell you how much it shook me at the time, because at once the scenario seemed so plausible yet also so horrible.
Not until I saw the movie, Seven, did I see anything so similar. Recently, in fact two weeks ago, a self described nihilist philosopher at Harvard walked up in front of a campus church and blew his brains out. He left a 1000 page suicide letter, which turned out to be giant dada-esque joke.
I’m amazed at how easily people throw their lives away, at how easily the prospect of making a stupid political stance or, as in the case of the philosopher, an idiotic joke can mean the difference.
There are lusty death cults afoot in the land. Inherently unhealthy, still they mock an parade and taunt. They invert death as a supercool alternative to life, and they have a growing following. It’s probably not good, no?
Cowboy #77 “‘Why are San Diego and Tijuana so different, then?’ To which Diamond has no answer.”
PJ O’Rourke once wrote that a Mexican friend said he didn’t mind that America stole half of Mexico; what made him angry was we stole the half with all the good roads.
Cowboy: That was a great post at #69.
Fides et ratio => truth.
People don’t want to hear that. There are partisans of fides and partisans of ratio but too few partisans of fides ET ratio. This IS why the light is dying out in the West.
Nobody wants to read, study or bother to understand Aquinas anymore. Very few, anyway.
********************************
I recall Zimbardo had a bestselling book back in the 70′s titled “Shyness.” It was one of many pop-psychology books that were popular back then.
In the video above, he tells us that kids today, by the time they’re 21, have spent 10,000 hours playing video games and their brains, he says, have been digitally rewired. They’ll never learn in a traditional classroom. It’s boring; it’s a disaster. I guess he’s saying we have to make the classroom more like a video game. I take it they won’t be learning anything about Thomas Aquinas.
#69 cowboy
“His question, “Who alive today will be studied 200 years from now?” is a haunting one I’ve been incapable of answering though it’s bugged me for decades now.”
It’s a question whose intent was expressed quite well several years ago by Derbyshire. I forget the exact quote, but he opined that the West had stopped making any art or music that was worthwhile, and that in 100 years none of the “art” being produced now would be even viewed or listened to. In essence, he claimed that as the West became agnostic/atheist and lost faith, it also became incapable of producing great, timeless art.
Beyond that, I would add that Jared Diamond’s wrong, awful, and corrosive thesis has a very, very strong appeal to the atheist postmodern “progressives”. It buttresses their entirely materialistic narrative, and in essence denigrates culture, religion, and the spiritual aspects of human existence. This exactly mirrors their personal goals and desires, and their internal dialogue and worldview. Presented with VDH’s revelations, or Aquinas’, regarding the real reasons for the growth and dominance of Western thought, the postmodernist will recoil and reject before even giving the notions any real thought, because those notions of VDH and Aquinas are things which disprove and destroy the chosen narrative – something the postmodernist is literally not capable of permitting. Think “emperor has no clothes” on steroids.
This polish choir does a wry funny version of
The Lion Sleeps Tonight
For drop dead beautiful listening pleasure.
In The Garden — Elvis Presley
Whenever someone makes a bold, confident statement about how such-and-such will surely happen in the future, I like to reply: “or not.”
Cowboy…
You must be referring to the trading Dutch and Venetians fortified by their moats and connected to the outside world by their state-of-the-art home-built ships rather than some hapless clan on the run.
In point of fact, the Venetians expressly chose their location because of its immunities. For centuries they jealously guarded their ‘turf’ against entry. Thusly, they did not participate in the Black Death, nor conquest by Napoleon.
It took paratroops to nullify the moat of Holland. Until that time, she had a stronger defense than the Swiss.
The British had an even bigger moat, and thusly ended up being the locale for one’s rainy day war chest, time and again.
But perhaps the biggest moat of all is the Atlantic. And I can think of at least one power that has been able to skimp on border defense thusly. Actually, the entire Western Hemisphere has been able to hide behind the Atlantic, and more recently, Uncle Sam, against the intrigues of the Old World. The next test: China.
It is becoming apparent that China has an instructional disaster building in her PLA and PLAN: she’s building the USN as a boogie man. The end of that projection is death and sorrow.
The last time a massive land power impulsively decided to ‘get wet’ she triggered a cataclysm. It turned out that the entire neighborhood didn’t want that kind of change. China is NOT a self-checkin power. That is not one of her graces.
The really odd thing about America is that being given the key to total global empire she turned it down flat. That is extremely revealing. It is also why she has stayed on top so long. An easy rider is a long rider.
And as for the Dutch and Venetians…
They have a record for sharp dealing as keen as ever recorded.
The Dutch dumped the worthless New Amsterdam for the island of nutmeg.
The Venetian Doge revectored an entire Crusade against his trading rival: Constantinople. On top of that he managed to remove the purse from its ‘noble’ leadership.
“imho the big theme of the first half of the 21st century will be the colonization of the deserts of the earth as the cost of delivered water 1000 miles inland to any desert …collapses.”
Sounds like Dune, another world like Tolkien’s but one without an eschaton, just cycles and the need for mankind to escape from prescience and all-seeing galactic leadership.
Wretchard’s last post on the Electronic Brain made me think of the commandment from the Orange Catholic Bible (Herbert’s fusion of three parts Christianity and one part Islam that drove the Fremen — though in the David Lynch’s underrated 1984 film version the Fremen holy men clearly resemble Orthodox priests with their beards, hoods and incense – don’t know if the famous designer Dino DeLaurentis was influenced by the Greeks and Athos). The sci-fi network adapation of Dune didn’t do it for me, though Children of Dune was actually better. I’ve heard rumors of a Dune reboot but I don’t think it’s going to happen, they should do God Emperor of Dune instead.
There is tension between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will. That dynamic tension is the heart of the dynamism of the west. It has its roots in the Judea Christian tradition. It was embodied most explicitly in the person of Jesus who embodied paradoxically God’s sovereignty and man’s free will by being both fully Man and Fully God.
97. Mr. X
“imho the big theme of the first half of the 21st century will be the colonization of the deserts of the earth as the cost of delivered water 1000 miles inland to any desert …collapses.”
Sounds like Dune, another world like Tolkien’s but one without an eschaton, just cycles and the need for mankind to escape from prescience and all-seeing galactic leadership.
………….
The deserts could be greened right now but we are used to cheap water on the east coast of the USA–so it will have to wait until costs come down. And they are coming down. Technically greening the earth’s deserts is much cheaper and easier than say, mining water on the moon for a settlement there–which is the current goal of NASA — a decade or three in the future–for which Americans pays 6 billion dollars annually. Total public/private R&D funding in the USA for desalination R&D runs about 50 million annually. Even at those rates the technology is moving rapidly. I posted on the AMTA conference this past summer here where technologies promise to drop desalination costs to 1/10th current costs.
Doing bulk water transfers–ie pipeline technology– through the deserts has recently become technically easy with portable nuclear power plants. But the costs of portable nukes will have to come down. The US is set to ship a bunch of these in 2012 but they will all go overseas because the USA doesn’t have the regulatory ability to handle them as yet.
Charles @ 99: “the USA doesn’t have the regulatory ability to handle them [portable nuclear power plants] as yet”
Read Quigley. Read Tainter’s “Collapse of Complex Societies”. This kind of expensive bureaucratic constipation has been seen dozens of time before in the evolution of human cultures — and it has inevitably led to the Reset button getting pressed.
The challenge for us today in the West is — Can we choose a different path? For the first time in human history, can we look our own bureaucratic beast in the face and stare it down? We have the knowledge. Do we have the will?
Amsterdam and Venise were merchandizing state-cities, where bank families initiated credit and insurances, thus helped a commerce fleet to develop. Amsterdam took over Venise because it had a government association with the other dutch provinces, but also benefitted of the spanish and portugese Jews families escaping inquisition. The money (gold, silver) was concentrated in these 2 cities, so they controlled the world market traffics. Venise slowed down as soon as the Ottomans took over the venisian harbours around Mediterranea
Marty #81:
The worst argument I can think of for manned space exploration is that it will inspire our children to study math and science. It’s even dumber than John Kerry’s “Have NASA focus on teaching other industries to become better, faster, cheaper.” and that folks, is dumb.
That is like building railroads to inspire folk singers. If you have a vibrant, “we go out there because it’s there and we will never ever stop” manned space program the kids will climb over each other to work on it, using rock hammers and pitons on each other’s skulls if that is what it takes.
More on this theme at: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/870/1
Re: Quigley’s Evolution of Civilizations
…have read several times…excellent…among other things, gives one of the most concise explications of “scientific method” to be found…
Re: the human spirit, from two examples
Abram the first Hebrew (one from beyond [the river])
Vikings – One accepted understanding of the verb “viking” comes from camping while traveling on journeys. The word carries a sense of a youthful exciting adventure (if one can lay aside murder, rape, robbery and pillage)
Whether human beings in the aggregate behave nihilistically, and they almost always have, there will be some remnant made of better stock, willing to pick up and start again.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. Macbeth …..or maybe not.
I’ve not much to add to Wretchard’s excellent essay and the very interesting posts on it.
The human mind often seems a Rube Goldberg construct in its architecture…the neocortex smeared atop the mammalian which is in turn stapled in some fashion to the reptilian…a committee with no one in charge. And yet we are supposed to use and control this contraption to get through our days. Who was it said, “Some days you get to slay the dragon, and on others you are lunch.”
As a life long student of cosmology, the first thing you must accept is that you will have to handle two things, a gargantuan sense of humility and probably never getting any real empirical answers to what you are studying. A huge dose of faith that one day the answers will be there, a theory of Everything will be found helps a lot also.
In his most insightful book, “Wherever You Go, There You Are” Jon Cabot-Zinn writes extensively on the subject of “mindfulness” and its importance to our lives.
My own thoughts on mind/mindfullness would be these:
The Stimulus arrives, the mind begins its Interpretation of the stimulus, which determines the mind’s Perspective on it, and thus your Response. Life is indeed full of catastrophes both natural and man-made. I believe the Creator looks to our Response. Perhaps that is where our true perfection and meaning are to be found.
Speaking of trading and gold and silver…
The markets are more than a little bit upset about the wholesale fraud: MERS.
Today, JP Morgan Chase just dropped out of MERS.
If you’ve never heard of it, MERS is the outfit with NO employees, NO board meetings, and yet has thousands upon thousands of ‘vice-presidents’ and ‘assistant secretaries’ rubber stamping mortgage transfers without paying transfer fees to the county recorders — and doing it nationally.
Apparently every attorney in the nation wants in on this game.
The banking cartel is probably headed straight for an implosion.
On its face the mega-banks and Wall Street have engaged in RICO scale fraud beyond all other frauds.
Only the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal comes close to this travesty.
The RMBS/MERS/Freddie/Fannie graft scandal has the same dynamic. The public is ripped off while graft flows to the Dodds and Bidens of the Senate.
The public rip-off worked multiple ways:
At the County level staggering evasion of transfer fees…
At the pension level destruction of one’s security interest in the mortgage…(!)
At the corporate level fantastic bust-out bonuses destroy bank equity…
At the legislative level wholesale graft and corruption + Central Planning…
At the administrative level wholesale capture of authority…
At the academic level wholesale capture of ‘deep’ thinkers/intellectual whores…
We’re in a Financial Civil War !
Miracle rescue in Chile thanks to American Exceptionalism
By Judi McLeod Wednesday, October 13, 2010
God smiled on the dramatic Chilean rescue mission of the miners trapped in the San Jose mine last night, and because of UStream, the World smiled too.
With millions watching on live feed broadcast direct from the site, the first of 33 miners were brought up into the light to see the unforgettable sight of the jubilant smiles and tears of joy of their own family members.
Tears of relief came from World watchers when 31-year-old miner Florencio Avalos Silva was brought to the surface at 11:11 p.m. EST.
The marvel of winching up miners, one by one, through the shaft in a capsule was going to work.
And it wouldn’t have happened without American exceptionalism and ingenuity at a time when patriots are trying to preserve those very characteristics in a fight to Take Back America.
By daylight this morning, nine miners had been rescued with the breathtaking rescue operation expected to continue over the next two days.
Things looked grim for the miners when the San Jose mine collapsed on Aug. 5. It was going to take painstaking patience and a marvel of engineering to bring the men, trapped 2,100 feet below, to the surface.
When it became clear that all 33 miners trapped in the mine were alive, an emergency call went out to find the expertise to save them and was answered by the Mission Woods, Kansas Layne Christensen Company, who sent their most experienced drillers to the rescue.
Although they’ve shunned the publicity, the heroes in this rescue mission are ones of epic proportion. They include two drillers Jeff Hart and Matt Staffel, who had been drilling water wells in Afghanistan to support U.S. troops stationed there. Assisting the drillers were two Spanish-speaking drilling helpers, Doug Reeves and Jorge Herrera from Layne’s western region in the U.S.
(Layne’s Latin American affiliate) “Geotec operations manager James Stefanic said he quickly assembled “a top of the line team” of drillers who are intimately familiar with the key equipment, including engineers from two Pennsylvania companies—Schramm Inc., which makes the T130 drill, and Center Rock Inc., which makes the drill bits.” (Michelle Malkin, Oct. 12, 2010.)
It was to be a hair-raising operation from the get-go.
As part of an amazing three-way race, Colorado father of two, Jeff Hart, drilled for 33 days straight and was first to reach the caved-in workers 8 a.m., Saturday.
Malkin continues” …”Standing before the levers, pressure meters and gauges on the T130’s control panel, Hart and the rest of the team faced many challenges in drilling the shaft. At one point, the drill struck a metal support beam in the poorly mapped mine, shattering its hammers. Fresh equipment had to be flown in from the United States and progress was delayed for days as powerful magnets were lowered to pull out the pieces…”
Typically American, strong, silent and unassuming, Hart had been drilling water wells for the U.S. Army’s forward operating bases when he got the call to fly to Chile.
Hart’s was a job that called for spending 33 days on his feet while loved ones of the miners stood by with their hearts in their eyes.
Watching the rescue from the distance of his home television screen in Colorado because he wanted this to become the miners’ and their families’ story, Hart told the Denver Post: “This is the most important thing I have done in my work and probably the most important thing I will ever do.”
Meanwhile, the American administration may not appreciate America’s exceptionalism, but they sure do in Chile.
uh, Charles why didn’t America make the same effort for Virginian miners ? I read that quite a few perished lately
It’s about the deficiency of the human soul. Incompleteness that we try to fill either with a frantic search for happiness derived from our own resources, or by a belief system in something that is greater than ourselves. God created that vacuum. Using volition, we can try to fill it with knowledge of God or with other stuff.
We cannot find the answer with rationalism or empiricism, for there is no proof, only faith.
Gee, marie, the mine in Virginia is probably is a coal mine, and obama said his plans to put the coal mines out of business, that was his policy plan, as some podunk senator-candidate from Illinois. There needs to be a sad outcome to further demonize the coal industry, so do you think politics has anything to do with it? Leftist politics can intrude into anything. People in france might have to work a couple of extra two years, and so now they shut the place down. Bravo!
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/10/13/so-much-worse-than-carter/
’nuff said.
“We cannot find the answer with rationalism or empiricism, for there is no proof, only faith.”
Actually, there is proof. Some people just lack the mental capacity to understand those proofs. Some are wilfully ignorant and have the capacity but lack the will to use it. Those are the lazy ones. It is just to much effort to think things out when they can just say ‘Gods’s will’ and wallow in their ignorance.
Meanwhile if that dirty old man in his bathrobe can’t afford a decent suit, or even Nike’s and Jeans, why is he considered omnipotent? If he was all knowing he should be able to make a killing on Wall Street, even in the middle of the Dobbs-Franks Depression. Even after the IRS and the SEC got finished, he should have enough left to buy a cheap suit at least.
I wonder if the Bible Store would cut him a deal?
Mercy sakes, what a thread –
To JL’s “Imagine”, here’s (ht instapundit) Sameuel Eliot Morison, in Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus:
“At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .
Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”
***
…and to that Golden Age, which we may still keep if we keep going to new worlds, like Mars for instance, it needs operating fuel, and we have deep trouble in the planetary fuel tank:
(snips)
“Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Saudi King Abdullah discussed regional affairs by telephone on Tuesday amid tensions over Iraqi and Lebanese politics and a Gulf arms buildup, the official SPA news agency said.
The leaders of the two rival powers “discussed bilateral relations and reviewed the overall situation in the region” in the rare call, SPA said.
The conversation took place as the two sides appeared to be at odds over the formation of Iraq’s government….
…And Saudis have become concerned about political turbulence in neighboring Bahrain, where the minority Sunni government has cracked down on Shiite activists, arresting 21 in August and accusing them of forming a “terror network.”
…At the Arab League summit in Sirte, Libya last week Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal spoke of lack of cohesiveness among Arab countries that creates a “strategic vacuum” that is exploited by “neighbouring countries.”
***
And to Charles’ musical interludes, and Mr X’s ability to possibly synopsize for us the story of The Little Bell –which i came across while searching for a certain Japanese Kingston Trio cover band, and –overwhelmed by the sound and expressive delivery and haunting video –plugged the youtube URL into search and found it had stimulated on another site ”sixty pages of comments in ten languages, many of them saying it was the most beautiful song they’d ever heard”. It’s by a choir of Don River Cossacks, or else by some guy named Don Kosack and his choir.
“Everyone knows there’s no place to go.”
Well, Yeah! Ever consider that the journey IS the destination?
The “divine” creative force, “Yaweh”, “Vishnu”, etc., descends into matter in order to re-emerge a self realized being. That is the story of Christ and is symbolized in the Star of David; two isosceles triangles, one down, one up, superimposed. I happen to also see the symbol for “Om” as an expression of the same mystic knowledge.
So, I take slight exception with the premise of this piece while appreciating the nuanced exegesis of the current malaise.
Buddy,
The world’s gas tank is going back to full even if cheap oil is over — cheap shale gas means you can cook out the oil from the shale, which this chap seems to be suggesting is the next hot thing:
http://moneymappress.com/category/members-only/energy-advantage/
That cheap desalinization to make the deserts bloom also sounds good, so long as we leave the deep deserts like in Dune. Still the whole point of this thread is that the world (or at least the West) can die for lack of beauty. I was touched that Wretchard seemed to hint that the Russians, alongside other Eurasians, seem to be rediscovering their future. Maybe he’s been to Moscow and seen as many babies and strollers over here as I have. Or seen the churches, at least on the feast days, beginning to refill. Dostoevsky wrote that ‘Beauty will save the world’. Perhaps he was thinking of the legend, which says that in the 800s Prince Vladimir’s envoys to Byzantium came back to him reporting that they could not tell if they were in heaven or on earth when listening to the Liturgy of St. John Crysosthom in the Hagia Sofia. The more secular have claimed that Vladimir just didn’t want a religion that wouldn’t allow a man to drink from time to time, and rejected Islam in favor of Orthodoxy for that reason. Regardless, truth/beauty won and will win.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNv5ZvzTGJw&feature=player_embedded
The Revolution: O + O = O.
Lenin/Stalin > O.
Wilson/FDR/JFK/Carter > O.
“*Here was what it all had added up to, all the blood and suffering, all the fierce hope and the angry dreams of the distant Revolution, now blurred in a misty past.
Drained of passion, empty of desire, the Revolution now stood motionless.”
…-
“The Paralysis of the State
By DAVID BROOKS
Sometimes a local issue perfectly illuminates a larger national problem. Such is the case with the opposition of the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, to construction of a new tunnel between his state and New York.
Christie argues that a state that is currently facing multibillion-dollar annual deficits cannot afford a huge new spending project that is already looking to be $5 billion overbudget. His critics argue that this tunnel is exactly the sort of infrastructure project that New Jersey needs if it’s to prosper in the decades ahead.
Both sides are right. But what nobody seems to be asking is: Why are important projects now unaffordable? Decades ago, when the federal and state governments were much smaller, they had the means to undertake gigantic new projects, like the Interstate Highway System and the space program. But now, when governments are bigger, they don’t.
The answer is what Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal once called demosclerosis. Over the past few decades, governments have become entwined in a series of arrangements that drain money from productive uses and direct it toward unproductive ones.
New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.
New York City has to strain to finance its schools but must support 10,000 former cops who have retired before age 50.
California can’t afford new water projects, but state cops often receive 90 percent of their salaries when they retire at 50. The average corrections officer there makes $70,000 a year in base salary and $100,000 with overtime (California spends more on its prison system than on its schools).
States across the nation will be paralyzed for the rest of our lives because they face unfunded pension obligations that, if counted accurately, amount to $2 trillion — or $87,000 per plan participant.
All in all, governments can’t promote future prosperity because they are strangling on their own self-indulgence.”
“The end result is sclerotic government. Many of us would be happy to live with a bigger version of 1950s government: one that ran surpluses and was dexterous enough to tackle long-term problems as they arose. But we don’t have that government. We have an immobile government that is desperately overcommitted in all the wrong ways.
This situation, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, has been the Democratic Party’s epic failure. The party believes in the positive uses of government. But if you want the country to share that belief, you have to provide a government that is nimble, tough-minded and effective. That means occasionally standing up to the excessive demands of public employee unions. Instead of standing up to those demands, the party has become captured by the unions. Liberal activism has become paralyzed by its own special interests.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/opinion/12brooks.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=homepage
*Russia
Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams
David K. Shipler
Penguin (1983)
Making sense of Google’s seemingly kooky concepts
October 13, 2010 By MICHAEL LIEDTKE , AP Technology Writer Making sense of Google’s seemingly kooky concepts (AP)
It may not always be immediately apparent to frustrated investors – they wish management would be more frugal and focus more on the stock price – but there’s usually some calculated logic underlying Google’s unconventional strategy.
Google’s brain trust – founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, along with CEO Eric Schmidt – clearly think differently than most corporate leaders, and may eventually encourage more companies to take risks that might not pay off for years, if ever.
The time is ripe for long-term thinking, with memories still fresh of the financial meltdown – a byproduct of Wall Street’s demands for companies to deliver ever-higher profits every three months and meet earnings targets set by analysts.
“Everywhere you look in this country, it seems that we are suffering from the consequences of too much short-term thinking,” said longtime Silicon Valley forecaster Paul Saffo, managing director of foresight for Discern Analytics.
“Google doesn’t have this disease,” he said. “It is one of the few lone bright spots we have in that regard.”
Even so, it might be difficult to fathom how Google can justify paying for the development of robotic technology that has driven cars thousands of miles on California roads without a major accident and committing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to help build a wind farm hundreds of miles from the Eastern Seaboard.
Charles…
DARPA wants it…
The robotic driver is EXACTLY what would save convoy lives.
Imagine the robot running point.
Imagine the robots driving supply convoys cheaper than heli-borne supplies.
As for the undersea cable system it will be a money spinner in the tropics.
——-
BTW, I suspect on economic grounds you’re off base about making the deserts bloom. It’s just too capital intensive.
However, diverting the drain water from the Rhone via a mega-garden hose to Algeria could be economic right now. Instead of agriculture it would sustain vacation resorts to great effect across the rim of North Africa.
As it stands right now, we’re letting fresh water salinate upon discharge into the Med even though a major customer is only hundreds of miles away. France could be swapping water for energy.
Italy could shunt fresh water south along the coast and do wonders for her own agriculture there. Following an isobar would make it cheap and easy. Pushing water is cheaper than purification.
Cheers.
Dont worry, be happy… China is taking care
‘China’s pipelineistan “war”’
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-10-12/china%E2%80%99s-pipelineistan-%E2%80%9Cwar%E2%80%9D
Blert@105,
Denninger had a great post on MERS, inc yesterday: The Mers Edifice Quavershttp://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=168845. For anyone who is trying to understand what MERS is, and what the legal issues are, this explains it nicely.
MERS, Inc. (Mortgage Electronic Registry Services, Inc) is a corporation formed by the Big Banks, and Fannie/Freddie to register the transfer of mortgages during the securitization process and bypass the local County Recorder.
Of course the Banks had no legal authority to set up this registry and bypass the Counties recordation process. The recordation of mortgages is a government process going back centuries in English Common Law and has certain rules like, requirements for written documents, wet signatures, and designation of both the buying and selling parties. Here again, these pesky rules were too much for our glorious Banks and they ignored them. Oh ya, and there was this issue of recordation fees for the Counties that the Banks avoided in their MERS scheme. But hey they’re the Banks and they make their own rules, don’t they. And there were a few other things like including defaulted or fraudulently appraised properties in their mortgage pools when they weren’t supposed to be there, but you know it’s really just a matter of bad paperwork don’t ya know. A little affidavit signed by the right Robo signer here and there, and it’s all papered over and good to go.
Now some peasants and their attorneys are suing the banks over their foreclosures alleging lack of clear title. These people just don’t know their place. It ‘s turned up this ruckus and now some of the Title companies are threatening that they won’t grant Title Insurance to our glorious bank’s foreclosures because of the lack of clear title. Criminity out loud. The banks had this good thing going and had it all worked out with Pelosi, Reid, the One, and some of the big RINO dudes, and now these people just had to make a fuss.
maz2 #114
Regarding the Brooks article – Brooks doesn’t really cover any new ground. Long have those in the center/right known about government institutional inertia. And rent-seeking, sinecure-seeking behavior was all to well known to the Founding Fathers, who tried to create a government and society which would resist such creatures after seeing them in action in the government of George III.
Fact is, this has been known for decades or centuries. Once a government institution reaches a certain size, its concern is not to do the job it was designed to perform but to maintain its income stream and power. Employment in such an organization is most attractive to the sort of small person who worships at the altar of the false god of perfect income security, the person who wants literally nothing more out of life than thirty years of a guaranteed paycheck followed by a guaranteed pension, and who doesn’t give a damn about excellence or problem solving or, really, accomplishing anything at all beyond keeping the checks coming.
I forget who said it first, but it is a true saying – no government employee will understand an argument against his income.
Nonsense on stilts. Most human energy goes to frivolity.
Only about 1% at our current rate of flow needs to go into working on improvements.
In any case the S curve is always with us. And all we know for sure is that rates seem to be slacking. But there never is any sure way to tell if we are jumping to another curve until we have jumped.
Oh. Yeah. Be here now.
MC/117; Pepe Escobar will never ever admit to any good effect of any USA policy or presence anywhere anytime irregardless. The article is excellent for the most part but early on it chortles at China’s brilliance in staying clear of war and military bases and all that cost and expense, and merely bidding the great deals with Iraq in “a perfectly legal international auction market”.
I wonder, does Mr. Escobar think The Lord dropped that safe, legal, open, reliable global auction market straight down from heaven into mankind’s grateful grasp?
Does he think it was the skillfully adept long-range planners of Beijing that so impress him, that 20 years ago chased Saddam out of the top of the Persian Gulf, out of an invaded and raped Kuwait –to save then and then continually keep saving right up to now, that open auction market for the world?
What makes alcohol worth killing for? Government.
I’ll bet you can’t guess what makes heroin worth killing for.
MS/122; –only a neologism (‘neolog?’) will do: “govermoney”
laff of the day:
ED DRISCOLL: GREAT MOMENTS IN HAPLESS POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS: “You know what else isn’t smart? Wasting campaign money by calling the 408 area code in Northern California, rather than the 480 area code in Arizona. I wonder how many other people in the San Jose area have gotten robo-called today to attend Glassman’s personal appearance tomorrow 748 miles away, out of state, in Sedona?”
Posted at 8:51 am by Glenn Reynolds
***
That’s a long drive, and when you get there you’ll be miffed to find out that he’s running for senator from Arizona, and you can’t even vote for him anyway.
Why do I feel that this is an extremely important essay, yet I don’t understand it. I would hope that you continue to write about this subject until I can catch up with you.
…Just nuke somebody..the Tribal areas of Paki or Iran…just do it …China and Russia aren’t going to do squat about it.
Geez, some of these posts are like a scirocco.
If Russia, China, and USA ever got together, and had one single little meeting somewhere and said, “OK, no more jihad, or else” –then that would be it –it would stop.