The Crises that Could Bring Down Putin - not so much.

http://www.mauldineconomics.com/this-week-in-geopolitics

"The Crises That Could Bring Down Putin"

Interesting, but (to me) ultimately unpersuasive.

Writing about a Russian dictator’s potentially “losing his grip on power” is a mug’s game: in the first place substantially underestimates that grip. 

Yeltsin, the example provided, was *not* a cutthroat climber in the sense of Russian leaders historically; no, he was the (Bill) Clintonesque sacrificial lamb shoved to the front of the group of annoyed Politburians in the late 80s as a domestic-protest-move.  I believe they probably expected he was – in the long-established tradition of Soviet politics – going to  disappear.  That he didn’t either signaled that Gorbachev was either strikingly different (still not sure that’s true) or astonishingly weak by that time.  In other words, the Politburo handed Yeltsin the reins when it looked like the stagecoach was about to crash, and he was stupid enough to hold them.  After they got through the bumpy bits, those same elites took the reins back away from him.  So he’s of nearly no use as an example.

In the second place, it discounts (as usual) the characteristically unique level of paranoia in the Russian psyche.  I’m not saying that this makes them impossible to predict, that would be silly.  But it’s typical of western analysts to begin their examination from a position of empathy: “how would I feel if I were a Russian, and what would be the consequences?”  Russians are NOT Westerners.  The term ‘inscrutable’ used to be applied to Oriental states whose motives & goals themselves were hard to understand.  Whenever a faraway country would do something completely baffling for reasons we couldn’t even rationalize after the fact, it was shrugged away with “well they’re just inscrutable”.  It’s declined in usage because of the quasi-racist overtones it eventually assumed, but I would posit that given our radically different cultures, history, and outlook: to Americans, Russians remain inscrutable.

No, the average Russian believes as a given fact every day that:

1)            Russia is in danger from its enemies, and

2)            As Russians, saving Mother Russia will require their personal sacrifice – certainly in comfort/quality of life, but up to and including their lives. (This isn’t to say that they are blindly patriotic and will sacrifice themselves for Putin personally; not at all.  But for Russia as a nation distinct from its government?  Pretty much so.) 

The only thing Russian leaders can do is highlight the immediacy of that danger to spur the Russian people to ‘hunker down’ through tough times as needed, and to prove that they (the leader) is the particular strongman that can shepherd Russia through (today’s) crisis.  The art, for a Russian leader (Stalin was a master, enabled by the existential crisis of the war) is to get “out of the direct path” of the threat to Matya Rossiya.  “The roof just started leaking, I just happened to be the guy standing here with a hammer and shingles”.  “Well of course we had to secure our bases in Crimea, the west had overthrown the democratically-elected leader of Ukraine and was trying to strangle the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea”.  Notice, Putin’s action isn’t the narrative – he’s just fixing another “goddamned problem”.

The replacement of governors with people from his coterie of hangers-on isn’t going to be seen as much of a signal; they all serve more or less at his pleasure anyway, and if any make a stink (they won’t, it’s …unhealthy) I’d imagine there are already ample volumes of leakable evidence of their corruption or selfishness.  Again, he’s just trying to fix the roof and Russians will recognize he needs a crew up there that he can trust.

More substantially meaningful here to American interests is the historical (apparent) rapprochement between Russia and Turkey.  They’ve been enemies with directly-conflicting interests since, well, forever.  I’ll say that again: these two nations have been in direct competition for at least FOUR CENTURIES and the US (as the standard-bearer for Western diplomacy) has managed to let them discover interests that may bring them into alignment.  That is a diplomatic failure (for us) of colossal proportions. If he can pull it off, Putin could turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake and win essentially unfettered control of Istanbul and the Bosperus.  That would be triumphal in the history of Russia, probably comparable (in US manifest-destiny terms) to Canada just dissolving and joining the US.

Here’s my $0.02 guess: the editor's mystification over ‘what was traded here’ between Russia and Turkey will become apparent perhaps as soon as the next 3-6 months.  Russians are chess-players; They certainly don’t have the ridiculously short attention span of American observers.  They don’t have 2-year congressional election cycles to satisfy, or 4-year re-elections to run.  They can seriously plan for 10-year results or even longer. 

What I expect is that Putin is trading his participation in Syria for breaking Turkey out of the west’s orbit, obligingly along the fissure created by the Turkish putsch.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ‘revolt’ was stage-managed by Russian agents (bonus points for them if they could convince Turkey/the world that they were Americans) directly for that purpose.

My guess is that could have been the point of the seemingly-pointless Russian military effort to prop up Assad from the start.  (That may be crediting Putin with too much prescience; more likely he was pushing a knight or rook out into the board as bait for what would opportunistically develop, but always in the knowledge that it really wasn’t there for function, but as a very-tradable sacrifice.)

I don’t even think which way the Russians and Turks jump matters all that much – whether Russia joins the fight against ISIS and abandons Assad, or whether Turkey pulls out of the fight against ISIS and (by negative act) ends up supporting Assad* - what matters to Putin and in the long game would be that Russia and Turkey would be working in parallel.

*I think the latter is less likely, given the personal enmity between Erdogan and Assad.  The former seems much more multi-valuable in terms of disarming criticism and undermining suspicion in the west.

The first hint will be the closure of US operations in Incirlik (the big US base in Turkey).  If that happens, I’d take that my prediction is likely happening.  (I just googled Incirlik to make sure I spelled it right and look what came up: http://sputniknews.com/military/20160816/1044330202/turkey-russia-incirlik.html “Turkey could provide its Incirlik airbase for the Russian Aerospace Forces jets in the anti-terrorist campaign in Syria, member of Russia’s upper house of parliament Igor Morozov said Tuesday”).  Well.

If you believe that police simply cruise the streets looking for black men to shoot, just stop reading. There's nothing for you here.

The PROBLEM isn't that we have too many cops shooting black men; that's the RESULT.

The problem is that there are too many angry, anxiety-laden confrontations between young black men and police. That many confrontations, with that much fear on both sides, a sizable percentage WILL end in violence. Such violence will generally logically end in the shooting/harming of the young black man because he's likely less well equipped, less trained, and likely outnumbered.

(Let me immediately dispense with the "skin color" thing; this isn't about skin color, it's about urban poverty which is altogether too easy to conflate with skin color. But that's not causal, obviously. We are basically talking about young black men, but it's not BECAUSE they're black.)

So there's two elements there: the confrontations, and the tension.

Let's be frank: the confrontations aren't because these young men are selling too many girl scout cookies, or mowing too many lawns.

The anxiety in these situations is twofold: the young men feel that the cops won't treat them fairly, and police are (justifiably) afraid that the confrontation will escalate into violence.

This comes from serious poverty. When young men (particularly) are really poor, there's a big thing about pride and "respect". It is a coping mechanism - if you have NOTHING else, and you recognize that you have little/no education, criminal record, maybe a kid or two, no stable home, you're aware your life is crap. They see the difference between their lives and what life "should be"*. It's human nature to rationalize by overcompensating your own self-image.

*I believe, tangentially, that our media culture hits them particularly hard in two ways. First, the gap for them between 'where they are' and 'where they should be according to the conventional wisdom' is nearly insurmountable. Worse (and this is probably the only place where skin-color does play a role), the lead figures they naturally identify with are celebrated (by white-owned media companies, let's not forget) as thugs, gangstas, and hoodlums. If you aren't the 0.01% with pro-caliber athletic talent, the ONLY other route to success (again, as presented is criminalism.

The problem is when this inflated sense of self-worth, bravado, machismo, whatever you want to call it, collides with the real-world situation of a police officer who HAS TO BE always conscious that his/her life is at risk. The tools that the urban youth uses to function in his environment with his peers - intimidation, fearlessness, aggression, posturing - are the only tools he's got (particularly when stressed). When deployed in a confrontation that's NOT the usually-fake-posturing that takes place between peers, these make everything worse.

So you can't tell the urban youth "don't act that way" - it's his ONLY TOOLBOX for his daily functioning. Likewise, we can't tell cops "don't care that much about your safety". How is a cop - particularly when we're talking about split seconds - supposed to distinguish 'empty brashness' from an actual threat? To Monday-morning quarterback those sorts of moments are, frankly, bull****.

An impasse of facts.

What we can say is this: poor, urban youth are living in an Hobbesian state of nature. The only way they're not going to do that is if we radically address that condition:

Either implement policies that truly encourage poor families to stay together & disincentivize fathers who abandon their children to an almost draconian degree, OR remove children from that environment. To the tangential point above about media companies, there needs to be a concerted, genuine effort by image-leaders to get out of the gutter. The gangsta-face makeup has done more durable, lasting, generational damage to young black men than blackface makup ever did.

NONE of these issues will be solved by throwing money at it. Frankly, I don't believe that activists for the left have the courage to face the catastrophic failure of foundational concepts behind their Great Society programs, and seriously work to fix them. Nor do I believe the right is willing to spend the money and time it's going to take (a generation or more) to tease out and address the root causes.

In that last context I think the militarization of the police is a part of the problem. As Democrats like to simply throw money at problems, in this case, it's more a GOP thing. If you have a rash of fires in your home, you're not going to try to solve it by giving the firemen more trucks and bigger hoses, would you? That would be absurd. Those things might help them put out the fires more capably but that's treating the result, not the cause.

Why is Donald Trump the GOP candidate for president?
I honestly don't think the GOP had any concept of how to deal with Donald Trump.

Since the latter days of the Reagan administration, in my opinion, the GOP has been hijacked (I'd call it an addiction) ever more to the right-wing evangelical vote.

THAT group, in particular, is particularly self-segregating (politically, if not socially and/or ethnically) and runs with blinders.  There's no reasoning with them.  They are lit by the fires of righteousness - not unlike many on the deep left-wing, that - so compromise is seen as weakness, not pragmatism.

I don't really get it.  Sure, there's a lock-in of a pile of votes if you're anti-abortion, but at what cost?  If the religious card could have been leveraged into breaking the lock the Dems have on the black vote through the Black southern Baptists, it might have been worth it.  If it could have further been leveraged into a big chunk of the hispanic vote through their strong Catholicism, again, probably worth it.

But if you're not going to fracture those two very natural demographics, then why the HELL would you tie yourself to southern religious conservatives?  Even if you ignore them completely, do you really think they'd vote for a Democrat?

The incompetent bunglers in the GOP party admin are too stupid to understand this.  They've managed to change the party of business and fiscal responsibility into the "narrow minded racist religious zealotry party" AND AT THE SAME TIME shown themselves to be just as fiscally [i]incompetent[/i] and self-interested as the Democrats.  So who are people going to vote for?

The Liberal agenda in the US is ascendant for lots of reasons from cultural to educational/indoctrinational.  I'd even say it's philosophical as per Plato's Republic or even Aesop - the grasshoppers are having a wonderful time, the ants look ridiculous for their concerns.  Them promoting a complete boob as their candidate for the highest political office displays either their complete lack of faith in the structures of our system (you might consider how monumental that is conceptually to a dogmatic conservative especially), or a troubling level of nihilism.  Probably both.

The US needs an opposition party; but that needs to be a CREDIBLE opposition party.  The GOP mandarins are far too busy in my opinion protecting their sinecure and personal wealth in Washington to perform that role any longer.

The point being that I think Trump's brand of populism isn't new; from the Gracchi in the Roman Republic to now, bomb-throwing crowd-pleasers have often riled the masses to their own benefit.

Where the GOP failed in this case is to understand the deep-seated and seething resentment in their core party over their failure to do anything in the last 16 years but kowtow to evangelicals, spending every cent of political capital on bullshit social issues that any *reasonable* conservative would consider NONE OF ANYONE'S BUSINESS.

Abortion?  Tragic, and sad, but very much an issue between a woman, her doctor, and her conscience.  As much as you may want to, one simply cannot legislate how women are going to value that unborn child.  Gay marriage?  Whether you "approve" of homosexuality is an intensely personal moral issue but in America, the foundation of this country is the premise that nobody has moral primacy over another.  Not a hereditary king, nor some suburban megachurch member.   In any case, the concept of marriage is one of stability and community - things conservatives used to consider important.

The resulting apathy of the core conservative mainstream means the nutters got to run the show...and thus you get a Donald Trump as a candidate.  Frankly, I'm doubtful he's even conservative; his anti-Establishment message simply 'sells' better within a party that is a) out of power, and b) nominally about reducing the power of government anyway.

OK, this is perhaps coming at it from a strange angle, but bear with me.

I was thinking about grief, and why it exists.  In particular, the agonizing grief of losing a loved-one.  It doesn't have an evolutionary benefit and in fact seems a detriment to survival, so why does it exist?

And where I went with that is that it may not have an evolutionary advantage, but it may be the unavoidable result of something that does have an advantage that outweighs the negative consequences.  Like bright light creates shadows or the dangerous snapping of a high-tension bungee cord, the affection we feel for our loved ones has the inevitable 'snapback' of grief when they're gone.

So that leads me to back to this question: is this uptick in mass shootings (when EVERY OTHER indicator of violent crimes is generally falling!) the inevitable 'result' of a self-absorbed, atomized, overindulgent society?  When everyone can have anything they want 24/7, whenever they want, when there are few (if any consequences) for counter-societal behaviors, how much of a stretch is it that some warped individuals decide to 'indulge' in mass violence?  The US is unquestionably the leader in narcissistic, shallow, self-indulgence in the western world.  What happens when a child gets everything they want, all the time?  They turn into a horrible, horrible person, commonly called 'spoiled'.  Why should we believe that's limited to children?

I'm not advocating anything here; I don't want to give up a self-indulgent way of life any more than anyone else.   I admire the Stoics, but honestly don't believe I have the strength of character to be one. (Besides, what's the logical conclusion of that path?  ISIS?)

What I wonder/fear is that the cultural path we're on has socio-/psychological implications consequences that haven't really been addressed seriously.
I'm not sure we ever can address them, as any substantive discussion veers off into politics, power, and protecting whatever indulgence happens to be "my own" priority.

Every time you hear about a shooting, simply replace the (agenda-motivated) gun reference with "killing" or "murder" because the DEVICE USED isn't (or shouldn't) be the POINT. Whether some dude killed two people on-air with a gun, a laser, or a claymore isn't at issue; the point is that some dude killed two people out of a twisted sense of victimization. The point isn't that some guy in Oregon killed 13 people with a GUN, it's that he killed 13 people and wounded many others out of a narcissistic sense of aggrievement. Our society is seeming to produce a prodigious number of narcissistic, practically solipsistic, nihilistic, violence-addicted (mostly men), who have a sociopathic lack of empathy for their fellow humans. One might comment on the atomisation of culture that's allowed that badly-damaged human to develop, despite our "enlightened" culture of compulsive, aggressive promotion of self-worth.

But no, we're focusing on the tools they happen to use.
If people are burning down houses all over town, do we give a crap that they're doing it with gasoline vs. kerosene?
If someone's chopping down all the forests, do we care that they're using a chainsaw or an ax?

Maybe we should focus on what matters?

KICKSTARTER is a “disaster”.

It was a great idealism, sure, but the ‘no visible means of support’ and ‘we’re blameless for whatever the project does’ bits all are now coming to maturity after the first heady flush of “oh let’s participate in this clever idea”.

I’ve found it fairly amusing that - in the midst of a so-called economic crisis - apparently a shit-ton of people have a shit-ton of spare money to naively throw at people they don’t know to pursue projects with no substantive business plan or even credible development program.

The entire thing doesn’t add up. I know, I know, “sharing economy” and all those nonsense buzzwords; well they don’t actually mean anything.

Certainly, it’s not impossible for some projects to reach fruition. But when we look back at this in 20 years and say “why did so many people dump so much cash on the basis of so little reason?” the successes are going to be a pretty small slice on the bell-curve of results.

I suspect that anthropologically, Kickstarter will be remembered like the Bacchanalia, Marie Antoinette, and Caligula writ large: an entire society with so much spare wealth that they can literally waste it on frivolity (when they’re not buying $8 coffees).

I don’t expect that these halcyon days will last.

I'm not getting paid $0.10/word to review Mr Obama's foreign policy, so rather than write a long exegesis, I'll confine myself to some of the fundamentals.

Certainly, it's worth observing from the beginning that Mr Obama inherited a complicated diplomatic landscape from Mr Bush; then again, there are few presidents that didn't have complicated situations; it's pretty much part of the job description.  Mr Bush inherited a hot-air economy and a security situation that would ultimately dump 9/11 on his watch: were those Mr Clinton's "fault"?  At a certain point, grownups understand that you can't keep blaming your parents for things that happen.  You can only cope, or not.  I'd argue that the bulk of Mr Obama's foreign-policy has been the latter.

First, the article tries to squeeze a lot of mileage out of vapid theorizing about his retrenchment and advancing the (classical) liberal world order.  This is a canard; foreign policy is about actions, results, and consequences.  Only intellectuals (and the sort of people who write long-drown-out apologias in erudite policy publications) have the luxury of steering their course by such ephemeralities.  In fact, Mr Obama's Wilsonian approach has caused at least as durable and persistent damage to the US's long-term global relationships as anything Mr Bush's blunders may have caused.

Let's review:
- the "pivot" to Asia:
has never actually happened, and frankly won't in the lame-duck years of the Obama Administration.  In fact, we have as revanchist and aggressive a China as ever, whose actions in the South China Sea have gone largely unchallenged, and a network of Asian allies that seriously doubting the US's willingness to defend our previous policy assurances.  I'm not saying that confrontation with China would be at all productive, but leaving allies to swing unsupported in the wind forces them to recalculate the value of distant allegiances when a restive, active, assertive China is on their border.  This is the WORST-possible outcome for the long term security of the US in perhaps the MOST IMPORTANT region of the world for the next century.  The US's economic and cultural dominance rests essentially on these proxies in the region, having them doubt the US commitment now is terrible.

- South Asia:
the Obama administration's strengthening of ties to India is about the only foreign policy success I can point to.  This was a positive move, at least checking if not outright calling the bluff on Pakistan's troublesome usefulness in the region.  I'm not convinced that India is a relevant counterweight to China - despite being neighbors, their spheres of interest don't really overlap - but coopting India out of a potential Russian courtship is at least militarily useful as it ever was during the Great Game.
Afghanistan is a mess, caused by a desperate flight of US involvement (if not yet quite all our military, as was promised).  I'm not saying that Afghanistan HAD a "winning endgame", but the festering decrepitude of our involvement there has solved nothing, and likely made it worse.  Mr Obama's campaign platitudes - as usual - were insufficient to address the subtleties of the context.  No progress, likely worse.
Iran...ah, Iran.  Mr Obama's desperate and recklass search for his legacy likely has provided breathing space to a regime entirely inimical to every American strategic goal in the region, alienated what few friends we had left, will dump at least $50 billion into Iran's extenisive terror-network, and to a group of cultures in which image and stature are everything, we have 'blinked'.  Far worse than the feeble flounderings of Mogadishu (which arguably invited Saddam's adventurism into Kuwait), the US has been shown to be spineless and craven, ceding regional dominance to whomever can take it and inviting the Gulf States to decide that the US is no longer the security guarantor it once was.  The result will almost certainly be a conflict between Iran's millions of people and Saudis billions of dollars to fill the vacuum of the now-absent superpower.

- The Mideast:
Israel: Mr Obama's obvious dislike of Israel has recently been overshadowed by the personal, mutual animosity he shares with Mr Netanhyahu.  The sole bulwark of Western liberal humanism in the region has not been an uncomplicated friendship, but it's been a durable one and will hopefully survive Mr Obama's tenure (and his deliberate efforts to harm it).  The US has, in essence, foregone the partnership meaning that Israel *must* now regard US interests with even less weight when choosing their course of action.  I cannot imagine that will be uniformly beneficial for US policy, as the Arabs still generally believe that Israel is a proxy for the US, no matter what they do.
Arab states: Mr Obama's vaunted idealims have utterly failed in the face of the Arab Spring.  His dithering intellectualism and relativism unmanned him in the moment when the US could have taken a role of moral leadership.  Either you lead morally, or pragmatically, but you can't do both and Mr Obama has done neither, leaving the popular movements to fester into the worst sort of internecine throat-slitting, where the most organized and brutal factions are winning, ie fundamentalist fronts whose success is anathema to long-term US interests in practical terms AND in moral ones.  By failing to lead, he's failed to secure either.
ISIS: I wonder if Mr Obama yet takes the "JV team" seriously?  Its astonishing that a US president can't even manage to take a stance or formulate clear policy against a medievalist, barbaric, brutal band of cartoon thugs that EVERYONE agrees needs to be eliminated?  Seriously, it's the only subject in US politics today that has NO domestic SIDE-BIAS: left, right, Democrats, Republicans, everyone agrees these guys are bloodthirsty animals...yet the US president, with the greatest bully-pulpit in history, can't even summon leadership on this issue.  Here is the perfect contrast between Mr Bush's approach, and Mr Obama's: yes, sometimes presidents can make bad choices, but failing to make any choice is a choice of its own, and often the consequences are even worse.  This is Syria and ISIS in a nutshell.  Conceding 'sphere of influence' to Russia in Syria was a quasi-19th-century move that even Mr Obama didn't seem like he believed he was doing, but was drowned out by the palpable sigh of relief ("At least it's someone else's problem now...") from the White House.  That's worked out great for the people of the region.

- Europe:
Russia was famously dismissed in a well-documented chat between Mr Obama and Mr Romney pre-election, Mr Obama has had to eat his words on this one, too.  Putin is an old-school thug of the KGB era, who personally witnessed the bankruptcy of Soviet power in East Germany.  He is utterly unafraid of the mealy-mouthed pronouncements from Washington, and in this lies the most dangerous threat of actual war: a Russian underestimation of US intentions in Europe and specifically in regard to the Baltic states protected by NATO Article 7.  We absolutely screwed Poland (who spent substantial political capital to host the ABM systems), and have now essentially "checked out" of any influence on the Ukrainian issue (that I believe we substantially created, if the arrogant US State Dept phone calls are to be believed).  We could have brokered a deal between Ukraine and Russia, playing a critical part in appeasing historical Russian paranoia and securing markets and peoples in Ukraine, but I suspect we got greedy and were naive about how Russia would react about the threat of NATO and the EU right on their border.  This shows a staggering disregard for history, culture, and a lack of empathy that beggars the imagination. Now, Ms. Merkel speaks with a far louder, more credible voice in Moscow than Mr Obama.
Further, we've routinely alienated long-time European allies, again dismissing multi-decade currents of history in favor of a sort of intellectual conceit from Washington about 'how the world works'.

No, while Mr Bush made plenty of policy errors, Mr Obama's tenure has been worse, in the long picture.

After just reading http://www.havokjournal.com/national-security/our-major-ally-against-isis-is-the-french-we-are-so-screwed/ I felt compelled to comment....

The denigration of the French military is about as fresh as Hogan's Heroes. To assert it in the first place identifies the source as not just being a boor, but identifies someone with a complete lack of knowledge and understanding about the historical contexts involved.

Yes, their performance in WW2 was pretty bad, but I submit that any force facing the Wehrmacht in 1940 would have performed about the same. The French during Fall Rot performed almost comically badly, sure - but then so did the US army when it first met German forces YEARS later at Kasserine (and the Germans were already on the strategic defensive and facing supply shortages). Even El Guettar, noted as the first time the US Army "defeated" the Germans was Pyrrhic, with US forces losing more than the Germans AND failing to secure any strategic gains (other than basically occupying abandoned Axis positions). The Germans in 1940-1941 rolled EVERYONE they faced.

Looking at the rest of the 20th century, France's poor military performance in the post-colonial era was...about as bad as the US in Vietnam. Going backwards, the French in WWI fought magnificently, as they did throughout much of their history. The "other" quick French collapse - the Franco-Prussian war - was again hardly the fault of their soldiers; it was essentially a 1,000,000 Germans using nearly-WWI tech vs 400k French equipped and trained to fight Civil-War-era combat (breech-loading Krupp 6# guns, for example, vs bronze muzzle loaders for the French).

So really, please, from an American that's about as patriotic as they come: stop with the easy jokes about "cheese-eating surrender monkeys". It's an amusing line, sure, but the French are a noble, humanist, western culture that we should be proud to have on our side against the modern-day barbarians clamoring at the gates. They deserve better.

God's Not Dead is a good example of the culture wars, and the main media's inability to even pretend to objectivity.

Rottentomatoes.com:
Tomatometer: 17% (from the critics)
Audience rating: 83%

Cost $2 million
Box office to date: $60 million

Tell me what indie film that nets 30x its $2 million budget wouldn't be the DARLING of the Hollywood media...unless it happens to portray Christianity in a positive light?

[url]http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/17/gods-not-dead-review[/url]
The Guardian's review: "Ban this sick filth"

Hell, the Variety review ([url]http://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-gods-not-dead-1201142881/[/url]) begins with mocking the idea that Christianity is under attack in the US...hardly even up for debate?  Does the line "...The movie’s risibly myopic worldview..." suggest the review is about the movie, or the subject?

I personally haven't even seen it yet (waiting for netflix dvd) so I don't know if it sucks or is great.  Every "Christian" movie I've ever seen post-1970 (not many) have invariably sucked so my expectations are pretty low.  But the coverage itself is interesting, if entirely expected.  I'd ask the Variety review if - believing Christianity isn't actually under attack - if he'd even read his own text?


EDIT: ok, I finally saw it.  I like Kevin Sorbo, and thought his acting was decent.  But wow, it really was a stinker of a film (like most overtly-Christian ones are, frankly).  It was ham-handed, unsubtle, and the characters were largely caricatures.  I still believe that the Guardian review was ridiculously tendentious and only peripherally about the film itself, but I have to agree with at least the superficial conclusion: this was a pretty bad movie, and its simplistic recitative did little to advance any sort of sympathy or understanding of a faith-based viewpoint in today's culture.  Sad.

Religion and Science

As simply as possible:

Personally I believe religion is about what happens outside/around empirical science. 

The creation of the universe? You can maunder on well into pure mathematics of pre-bang cosmology or poly-dimensionality (which, let's be honest, aren't giant steps from religion themselves) all you want, but ultimately the question becomes "how did it start?"...and there sits God. 

Philosophically, it's almost a Zeno's Paradox - every time science explains a little more (which, personally, I applaud as a triumph of rationality), it doesn't diminish God in the universe, far from it.

Global Warming IRREVERSIBLE and CATASTROPHIC...(well, except for all the previous times)

I'm just going to post this here, so I can link to it easily in conversations.

For 7-8 years now, every time new dire information about the catastrophic state of the world's climate comes out in the general media, I post essentially the SAME question.

Referencing the following data from the EPA:*

That we are in a warming period, there is no doubt.
However, about every 100-120k years for nearly the last million years, there has been an almost-identical spike in temperature.  And they sort of seem to be increasing in amplitude.
The question for those proposing an anthropogenic (human-created) source for the warming is this: "What makes THIS temperature spike unique compared to the repeated examples in the record?"

This question remains unanswered to this day.

Because if this current spike is unique, you're actually making TWO assertions:
- the previous cyclic behavior has stopped (why? how?)
- a novel element (human activity) has replaced it coincidentally both to the exact same degreeand at the right time chronologically.

Some have tried to argue it away, but their response has been essentially "We should have already been declining, but human activity has prevented it."  This is specious on multiple levels:
1) the inherent sketchiness of drawing century-scale conclusions from annual data make it impossible to say that this is true.  One can cherry-pick the years, the averaging spans, etc to draw almost ANY conclusion.
2) the record itself shows double-bump and extended warm eras far in excess of the span we've currently experienced.
3) the 'public argument' is that humans are CAUSING the warming.  To misstate this is either naive or disingenuous.  The headline "Humans making natural warming last longer" is far less histrionic, and likewise far less likely to make anyone care.

I'm not a scientist, but I believe I'm reasonably clear about the scientific method.
Extraordinary conclusions require extraordinary proof.
The simplest explanation for the current warming spike is that it's more or less the same as what's happened several times before.  It's entirely possible, in fact plausible, that 7 billion humans' industrial activities *have* had some impact, certainly.  But the overall general effect?  I remain unpersuaded that it's human-caused.

*I used to always reference Wiki data below but that graph was both harder to explain given its changing scale (inflating the importance of recent data, which a cynic might view as usefully misleading if one wanted to convince someone of Global Warming...) and more-easily doubted as it's from Wiki (regardless of how well-referenced and factually correct it is):

Bitcoin and you

I had an older friend ask me to 'explain' bitcoin to him.
No doubt (knowing this friend) he'd gotten some rightwing crapmail about how US CITIES ARE DUMPING THE DOLLAR! (which is patently nonsense).

Yet...
Maybe this isn't news to any of you, but in my explanation to him, it occurred to me Bitcoin is pretty clearly a symptom, not the disease.

World Governments (including the US, certainly) have made it abundantly clear over the last 10-20 years that they DO NOT have the ‘best interest’ of their people at heart; they are only about creating wealth and opportunity for their leaders.

To me, Bitcoin shows that even a system as notionally “objective” as the medium of exchange is subject to a ‘black market’ of sorts when people no longer trust it.

Personally, I still won't dabble in Bitcoins.  I can't see replacing one weak, fiat currency (the USD or Euro) with an EVEN WEAKER, EVEN MORE VIRTUAL currency.
Far better to invest in durable goods of value (and yes, if one is that nervous/desperate, precious metals*) than in ANY intermediary fiat currency.
*one would have to recognize that much of the value of these is equally fiat.  What good - precisely - is gold, except insofar as it's "universally" valued?

In short, if you're nervous about your liquid cash, I'd say better to turn it into a good rifle and practice to be good with it, than into bitcoins or gold bars.

My recipe for the GOP:

To win in our modern voter demographic, the Sane Conservatives HAVE to seize the middle.  

This means a judicious, rational PUBLIC jettisoning of certain 'conservative' positions that are too easily used as strawmen by the Left (and their tame media).

I genuinely feel that the Republic is more in danger than ever before.  The idea of the internal collapse of the US - inconceivable even in the worst of days 20-30 years ago - is now an actual likelihood over the next five decades.  Admittedly, it's still a small %, but the fact that it's extant is frankly horrifying.

And if the US passes, I fear one of the last, best hopes of humanity will disappear into a Sino-Asian future of collectivization and centralization.  This is not just a battle for the political control of this country; it's a battle for the soul of the future of humanity in general.  Will it be about enterprise, individualism, initiative, and humanism? Or will it be about teeming masses clinging desperately to a precarious existence, hopeless, and living off the beneficence of a powerful few in government who "know best how to run things"?

Taking this fight in absolute seriousness, we HAVE to be utterly pragmatic: win on the points where we HAVE to win.  Sacrifice the sort of ideological purity nonsense that has engendered fear and reluctance both in centrist voters AND centrist candidates - we've scared away good people who simply refuse to participate in the process because they don't want to be excoriated for not holding "proper" right-wing ideological positions.

Stop posturing.  Stop making the Left's job so damn easy.  Make the hard calls and accept it.  This would earn us more respect than the constant weaseling for votes.  Yes, it might be painful.  Yes, it might cost us votes.  But we're the abject minority NOW; now is the time to take those hits to position ourselves for success later.

If the GOP (for example) announced that it would henceforth ENTIRELY (and genuinely) dispense with any reference or position on abortion (as it is a moral and personal issue, and NOT one for government, particularly government in abject crisis), and focus purely on the running of the country in a fiscally reasonable manner - once people actually came to believe it, we'd *have* the huge majority of middle class voters in this country.

Yes, it would cost you the people for which this is their SOLE issue of import.  But you should perhaps trust them a little more too; the ability of this issue to determine elections only exists because Republicans let it be so.  Yes, some will refuse to vote for a party that 'abandoned' their focus.  Too bad.  The bulk of others will likely review their choices practically and say "hey, that candidate may refuse to even discuss abortion; but I agree with 80% of everything else.  It's better than the other guy, certainly."

Dump the dogmatic stuff that is DRIVING away the bulk of voters who fundamentally agree with the platform of fiscal common sense and minimalist government.  Stay "ideologically pure", and remain ever-more marginalized.

A defense of religion that even Dawkins might understand (albeit I expect he'd still object to it).

I think it's harder to understand the role of religion over the bulk of human history from the perspective of the 'enlightened' 21st century. PERSONALLY, I think the social 'sciences' broadly do a horseshat job of understanding just about ANYTHING contextually given contemporaneous beliefs, conditions, values, etc.

For example, while we all recognize there are many things we don't know, the bulk of what we see and do every day is explainable. We know why the sun moves across the sky, we know where infections come from, we understand why those people have different color skin than we do. Hell, kindergartners understand and accept germ theory, the big bang, atomic theory, gravity, etc. For people even a handful of centuries ago, all of this was systemically inexplicable. Some people got sick and died, we don't know why. Half of all children or more, dead, in many cases inexplicably. Some people started behaving crazily, again, no idea why, nothing to do but conk them on the head and chain them up in the barn until they died.

Some brave social anthropologists have done research that suggests strongly that:
a) religion simply made people behave better generally. With small children, the idea that there is an 'invisible grownup' in the room made them much less likely to cheat, much more likely to follow rules, much more likely to cooperate. Is this a 'control' mechanism, or was it observationally true that people who belonged to church (and in most places there WAS only one, so there was no confusion about which was 'right') cooperated better and were simply generally more successful
b) adherence to the visible tenets of a religion (going to temple regularly, observing the dictated trivial restrictions, etc.) was a strong correlative to people who could behave according to the accepted rules of a society. If they could discipline themselves enough to wear a little hat (for example), or so the theory goes, they could be expected to discipline themselves to follow other, more critically-important rules of a society.

Did it mean that in some cases outsiders were treated harshly? Yep. But again, omlettes and eggs. Today, we have an extraordinarily resilient society, we can tolerate assholes. But if you're barely surviving in a lifeboat, you need to pitch the boat-rockers out to save the rest. And let's recall further that the definition of outsider - while fixed and generally unchangeable so seemingly harsh from our view - was rarely arbitrary. Generally the 'rules' were determined and understood for generations if not centuries.

Again, secularists LOOKING to call this 'control' miss the boat.
When a small group/clan/village/whatever is riding barely above the margin of sustainability over long spans of time, this sort of consensus (call it a consensual delusion if you need to salve your modern sensibilities) meant that some communities survived, where others didn't.

And really, isn't that pretty much the only yardstick we HAVE for "success" in the real world?

Miscellaneous points today as things seem to be spiralling downhill ever-more-quickly lately...

A question for the Left:

So, how's that 'living' interpretation of the US Constitution working for you, then?

Are you still with Thurgood Marshall's interpretation "...he argued that the Constitution must be interpreted in light of the moral, political, and cultural climate of the age of interpretation..." in which changing circumstances allow changing interpretations of inferred language?

I've always been a strict constructionist, for the inimitable (but apocryphal) lesson of Thomas Moore in "A Man for all Seasons":

Quote:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

The Devil is turning, gentlemen. And you quite specifically have been the ones spending the last 30+ years shredding that very Document, that Creation of Man, that could have protected us.

_______

Re California's letter to Bitcoin demanding they cease operation or face aggressive prosecution for money-transmission without proper licensing/approval:

Dear Bitcoin:

We are uncomfortable that your fiat currency is a) starting to make our fiat currency look a little silly, and b) circumventing our ability to control the public. Please stop or we will have to get rough.

Signed,
California and the Fed

_________

Re Mr Obama's soon-to-be-formally-announced big plans to address Climate Change:

To my public, and in particular former supporters,

Since everything else seems to have gone in the shitter, I come back to you with a message that seemed to sell well in both campaigns: the environment.

I look forward to again gaining your broad support with a campaign of platitudes, anthemic one-word slogans, and statements that make me appear sympathetic to your issues, while actually resulting in policies that either ossify the current corporation-based lobbyist-driven structure, or expand the pervasive control of the Federal government ostensibly for good reasons but which will in fact be used to incrementally decrease your rights vis a vis that "Constitution" thingy, which I will continue to re-interpret as really not relevant to today's realities anyway.

Signed,
Your President.

Ends, means, and certainty.

Holy crud, 2 posts in ONE DAY?
The end DOES justify the means.  It's a foundational concept of LIFE, particularly social organization.
For example, for most people, work sucks.  But they do it, why?
Imprisoning people is fundamentally a mean thing to do, but if someone murders someone else, we put the murderer in jail.  Why?
We CONSTANTLY do unpleasant or unhappy things, because they will ultimately result in better things (or at least good things).

Now, we can argue about the relative merits of ends vs means, but I'm really fecking tired of people claiming that "justifying the method by the result" is somehow inherently morally flawed.

And yes, I understand that I'm invoking Godwin's Law here but also yes, I get it: Himmler no doubt felt he was doing the RIGHT thing as much as we feel we're doing the RIGHT thing fighting terrorism.  Does that make us morally equal?  Ultimately, I find the intellectually-simple shortcut of thereby equating us is intellectually laze and frankly reprehensible.  At some point an adult has to grow up and decide that some things are good and some things are bad, and stop excusing the bad because it might be unpleasant or uncomfortable to fight it.

Personally, I suspect that avoiding moral certainty is based in cowardice: Ultimately, since according to the relativists there is no actual God, there is no ACTUAL moral yardstick; what is "good" is determined by the simple will of the majority around us.  Those afraid to take a stand are afraid they might be wrong, and that the majority will turn on them, so they advocate tolerance of everything to ultimately protect their own ass.

So yes, taking a moral position is *risky*.  It takes some courage to say "THIS is what I believe, and f' you all if you disagree".  But that's being a grownup.

THE GUBBERMINT IS SPYING ON ME.

Rage all you want against the 'terrifying new revelations' about government data collection, this is the INEVITABLE arc of human societies.

I know Toynbee may socio-historically old-fashions, but it seems a never-ending repetitious cycle:  humans scrabble their way out of chaos and savagery, build cohesive societies that take care of basic needs freeing their citizenry to think and dream and grow.  Ultimately, the weight of a society exceeds its carrying capacity (largely through the people's ignorance of how great they have it compared to the alternatives) and everything collapses in anarchy and violence, until some inspired individuals lead the way back out of chaos again.

But we're social animals (emphasis on the latter).  Freedom is HARD; look carefully behind a student's eyes on graduation day, and you'll see a core anxiety "OK WTF do I do NOW with my life?"

(As an aside, I believe that this is the core reason that college is perceived to be so necessary to job-hunters today.  It's not the commonly-ranted "companies are demanding college degrees for everything" complaint, that's confusing cause/effect.  I believe that the comfort-value of a life-on-rails with few meaningful choices has kept people in school longer and longer.  It's simple, lazy, expensive procrastination of "real life" for another 4+ years.  Faced with a ridiculous excess of applicants with college degrees, wouldn't you as a business likewise begin to demand them if only as a first-tier way to weed out candidates who ostensibly have fewer skills?  If you think about it, it's actually contrary to what they should WANT in an employee, and why a thoughtful HR department should consider carefully if they really want degree-holding applicants, if the degree isn't directly pertinent to the job.)

You can see it too if you play a face-to-face roleplaying game with today's teens, they are literally paralyzed with choices, as opposed to the linear games with fixed, obvious options that they're used to from their PC or consoles.

In a couple of moments of startling clarity from an otherwise vapid film:
"Loki: I come with glad tidings of a world made free.
Nick Fury: Free from what?
Loki: Freedom. Freedom is life's great lie.
...
Loki: Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel."

They are lines that are supposed to enrage, of course, to light the righteous indignation in freedom-loving Americans (and in fact it's immediately followed by the formulaic 'defense of the lone guy brave enough to stand up' and Capt America's line "You know, the last time I was in Germany and saw a man standing above everybody else, we ended up disagreeing."
ANYONE who watches that and doesn't immediately recognize the historical truth of Loki's statement hasn't been paying attention.

As artists have a particularly skillful ability to be succinct (I don't know the artist):

Personally I suspect that freedom on the level of that envisaged by the Founding Fathers is unsustainable, because it demands a broad level of intelligence, education, the leisure to care about things larger than ones' next meal, and the willingness to put in the WORK.  Lying in your hammock isn't freedom, it's the reward of freedom.

Either people are generally too indolent to be willing to work for it (think herd of sheep or cattle, happy to merely have food and get milked/sheared once in a while in exchange for perceived comfort & safety - until the farmer needs meat, but that's in the distant future...), or the governments have figured out that the way to ensure their grip on power is to opiate the masses.  Either way, the masses are largely happy with it and always have been.

So stop your screaming and shouting.  Ecce homo, indeed.

And, if you need a little humor on this subject - the Onion nails it again: http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-outraged-his-private-information-being-co,32783/

Regarding the Difficulty of "Winning" Counter-Insurgency Conflicts

The problem is the definition of "winning" in a COIN conflict; it's often neither conclusive, quick, nor politically appealing.

Vietnam was indeed a military victory, but was politically a complete rout - validating Clausewitz and thus invalidating everything the military actually accomplished.

The War Powers Act has historically been seen as a check on the power of the Executive, this is completely turned around in the modern era.  Since about 1947, there has been a tacit (if not explicit) collusion between the Congressional and Executive branches of government: the Congress will let the President deploy troops pretty much however he wants to with only a little public bleating, in exchange for his not demanding the War Powers Act.  They both win - he gets flexibility in policy, they don't ever have to take a public position on what he's doing.

I find this deeply broken, and leading not only to bad public and geopolitical policy, but bad for our soldiers.

Yes, FORCING Congress to pass a War Powers resolution before a CiC can deploy troops abroad would act as a check on the power of the President.  But it would also require consensus, and this means that the People would have to largely be behind it (for the cowards in Congress to crawl out from under their rocks and actually support it in the record).  FORCING such public and shared culpability means that if stuff goes sideways, we ALL have to recognize our parts in the choices being made.

To the original point, I submit that the "Lesson not learned" from Vietnam was clear; while our military has gotten even more crazy-proficient at what they do, and the force differential made the military victory even more foreordained, the failure was identical in 2003-2011 as it had been in  1961-1975: if you cannot sum up the goal of the conflict in two or three sentences (or ideally, one), you are going to be stuck there for a long time.

Part of a War Powers act MUST, therefore, include "Why are we fighting?" and "What conditions must be met to bring home our troops?"  Not 'most' of our troops.  Not 'pretty much all' of our troops.  ALL of them.  If the goal of 2003 had been "topple the Iraqi government" - pretty much everyone would have been fine with that.  In that case, our forces would have returned in 2004.  If it had been - as it turned out to be - "Topple the Iraqi government and rebuild it as a modern Liberal Democracy and then leave some bases in place to try to secure the security situation in the heart of the mideast with American forces for the indefinite future"....well, I think the public response would have been immediate, colorful, and probably used some very old Anglo-Saxon words.

To the OP: COIN conflicts are inevitable, with any non-peer opponent today.  Dealing with them REQUIRES competent politicians as much as generals, both at the front end and the back end.   Unfortunately as skilled as our troops are, our political leaders of both parties are far more capably incompetent.

Edit (addendum)

Yes, I'm aware that getting a War Powers act would be harder.  That is, I think, healthier.  It should be hard for a country to go to war.  REALLY hard.

Further, as much then as we'd share the blame if things go wrong as a result of issuing such, we ALSO would have to face the consequences of NOT doing anything which is often much worse.

Yes, this requires an actual 'adult' conversation about the situation (as complex as it may be) and the ramifications of doing something vs. doing nothing, and getting some sort of consensus out of a public more enamored with this weeks American Idol voting than issues of substance.  So be it.

The threat (?) of China

I doubt China would ever deliberately just "attack the US".  There's just nothing in it for them.

However, the odds that China ends up in a REGIONAL war that ends up with them fighting one of our allies (Taiwan, Japan, even India), and us getting sucked in are certainly uncomfortably greater than zero.

Then you have a Japan 1940 situation: an untested but arrogant and growing military power, clearly a regional power, trying to shoulder its way amongst other regional powers, but intelligent enough to understand that ultimately the guarantor of the status quo is the US.

Then what?

Then China's motivation becomes a game of poker; to what level must it raise the geopolitical ante, such that the US will walk away from the game?

THIS is the critical, one might say almost existential, question of the next 20-30 years between the US and China.  I fear it won't take longer to resolve than that.  Perhaps much less.

The calculus here is complex and not encouraging.
China is a burgeoning economic, demographic, exuberant 'growing' power.  The US is the pre-eminent military power bar none, but its economic system is a sham, its leaders (on both sides of the political fence) feeble, incompetent, and utterly self-interested.  The US public is lazy, apathetic, ignorant, and cheerfully distracted by TMZ.

On the other side, of course are a few critical questions:
- How much of China's economic clamour is real, and how much is Potemkin smoke and mirrors?
- China has severe demographic issues regarding gender balance, youth, and the growing bitter gulf between the haves and have-nots both within China and compared to the rest of the world.  These are only getting worse, and are amplified by a government that seemingly likes to toy with jingoism - neglecting the lessons of history that suggest in the long term it's something nearly as dangerous to the sponsor.
- Russia is a dangerous wildcard, remaining a revanchist proto-Soviet state under Putin.  Wide, empty, resource-rich spaces of Eastern Russia make this an extraordinarily sensitive spot for a Russian military already overstretched.  Russian ego-investment in their far-eastern districts is also not insignificant.  Their participation in any conflict would be opportunistic, aggressive, and extremely brittle.
- India, likewise, is extremely wary of a growing Chinese state lurking not-far-enough-away on the other side of the Himalayas.  The 'great game' West of Mongolia has been quiet since WW2, but it's been in play since the late 1800s and certainly isn't resolved yet.

All of these are a subtle confluence of varying factors; the reality of each doesn't even matter so much as the Chinese PERCEPTION of reality.  And this introduces what I think is the absolutely greatest wildcard: Chinese understanding (or lack thereof) of the US.

The US population is largely lazy, overweight, and apathetic.  Would an actual attack on the US be enough to rouse them from their torpor?  I honestly don't know, but I'm absolutely CERTAIN China has no clue.

What I fear is the habitual misunderstanding - and critically, underestimation - of US culture by others.  As much as any "foreigner" can fail to understand any culture (the US trying to understand China, for example) the US seems to regularly and particularly baffle outsiders, even people from relatively close cultural analogues as Germany, or France, much less China.

What I fear specifically is that the Chinese mandarins will, wearing the same blinders that Chinese have had for at least 2000 years, dismiss the US's potential response.  Like the belief in some quarters pre-GulfWar2 that the US "won't put up with casualties, ergo they won't get involved" - this both right and desperately, critically wrong.  The US public does habitually have an intolerance for suffering, no question.  But the lesson of history is that when enraged, we're capable of rationalizing and accepting staggering violence in the pursuit of "justice".  Even the relatively showy but strategically trivial attack of 9/11 motivated us to deploy our ground military for 10+ years WITH NO STRATEGIC GOAL.  Heck, we didn't even really use our air force or navy.

If there was an actual, direct attack on US citizens, I genuinely fear the response of the US public, and I'm not sure China does.  And in that inequality lies a terrible, terrible danger.

Apropos a conversation I'm having elsewhere:
I have no problem mocking religion, mine or anyone else's.  I think there's a LOT of humor-material in any religious creed and PERSONALLY, if someone is wound so tight that they can't laugh at themselves or their sacred cows (see what I did there?) that almost makes them MORE worthy as a target.

HOWEVER, if you're going to make fun of someone for something, and you deliberately choose to make fun of the person that you KNOW isn't going to react, that just makes you a wuss.

If you want to tell a 'challenging' religious joke in mixed company, fine.  But then 'pick on somoene your own size'; tell one that challenges the frothing fundamentalist standing right there who might take a swing at you, not the octogenarian lutheran lady that's just going to be uncomfortable but too polite to even say anything.

So yeah, make jokes about Christianity.  God gave us a sense of humor, after all.  Just don't be an intellectual coward about it.  (And REALLY don't then be a hypocrite and claim "that" certain indigenous faiths are 'protected' from mockery simply because they're brown people, that's just naked PC bs.)