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.)

I think Congress as an entire group should be impeached and removed from office.  Both parties, all members.  The GOP controls the House, they would lose that.  The Dems control the Senate, they lose that too.  This is not a partisan issue - it is a (lack of) competence issue.

The entire 'budget' dance since summer 2011 - the deal, the commission, sequestration - is all patently unconstitutional.

CONGRESS (you know, the people who control the purse strings) made a deal to
- set a small commission who would agree what would be cut.  OK, it's a farcically stupid idea with today's politicians but lets assume that it worked - Congress is VOLUNTARILY giving up its control as a body to a smaller body, selected not elected.
- if this commission couldn't decide, automatic broad cuts would take place.  Again, they are not fulfilling their jobs, they are simply mandating a mechanism that obviates their role entirely.

Sequestration is not "them doing their jobs, just badly" - it's not even that.  It is like your gardener (who has allowed your garden to become grossly overgrown with weeds) saying, "I really don't want to go through the hard, tedious, and painful work of sorting out the good plants from the bad, so I'm just going to cut EVERYTHING 6"."
From a gardener, it would be absolute incompetence.
From Congress, this should be criminal.


I grant that calling it unconstitutional may be overstepping.

The Constitution states that "...The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;..."  Conceded, it does not assert a method.

But if Congress took to paying our budget by pulling bingo balls and randomly allocating funds, I suspect we seek some recourse to impeach them for failing to conscientiously exercise the duty assigned to them.  What they are doing now is no better (and frankly, no more effective).

We need to punish incompetence in our politicians, not re-elect 90%.

The data seems to indicate that the gap between the 'have very muchs' and the 'have very littles' is growing. The "have just enoughs" have kind of been getting crushed.

Yet...this is invariably attributed today to the growth of rampant capitalism. Is that justified, or is that just a relationship pulled out of someone's backside because it "seems right"?

Were I to assess capitalism-ness as a metric, I'd say it's pretty clear that the USA in the late 19thC and early 20thC - the era of the rail barons, the Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Pullman strikes (1894), the Triangle Shirtwaist fire (1911), etc. - was a society far more "nakedly capitalistic", unfettered by government oversight or regulation. Further, the sheer growth of government since that time, the 1929 crash, the New Deal, WW's I and II, the War on Poverty, the Great Society Programs, etc. would suggest that capitalism has been if not receding, than at least mitigated strongly by regulation, government instutions and, honestly, public expectation.

My point is that the growing disparity in incomes between the top and bottom has paralleled the ebbing of capitalism, not been counteracted by it. Adam Smith might hypothesize that as the government is more and more involved in the market, it picks with disproportional force 'winners' and 'losers' that may be contrary to the long-term health and benefit of the system. Capitalism is conflict-based. Successful capitalism REQUIRES some people make bad choices and suffer for those choices for the collective good. It equally requires businesses to fail - with the concomitant pain for the workers of said businesses. A close reading of the Wealth of Nations makes it clear that for capitalism to function at its healthiest, it HAS to be universal. Any intrusion of anti-market activity - specifically, government - harms the efficacy of the system as a whole in broad and subtle ways. (FWIW union activity itself is inherently NOT anti-capitalistic, as some shallow commenters have suggested; labor organization, striking, etc are all very inherently capitalistic responses to perceived imbalances in the power between employer and employee; HOWEVER, government taking a side and preventing the natural resolution of the conflict is very *definitely* anticapitalistic)

I'm not making any prescription here. Just observing that the 'common wisdom' that 'as capitalism increases, so does wealth disparity' doesn't seem to be borne out by historical fact for at least the last 100+ years.

An open letter to those who complain about the political climate:

Isn't this exactly what we wanted?

I mean, we're the electorate, and we consistently vote for representatives who are short-sighted, self-interested, and frankly, stupid.

I don't care WHICH side of the political fence you're on. Both parties have full rosters of idiots, and we seem to be listening more and more to the histrionic extremists and punishing the moderate centrists.

BOTH parties seem entirely focused on maintaining their own partisan grip on power and enriching their supporters, rather than actually doing their jobs.*

*and yes, it's not just Democrats and Republicans.  There is a rind of political 'conscientious objectors' who insist on voting for third-party candidates.  Yes, on occasion when the two major blocks are precisely balanced, this can make a difference in US politics.  But understand, the bulk of the dialogue is between the two basic parties in the US, and the the 'third option' only has influence as a tiebreaker.  They throw no weight, politically, except insofar as their message becomes broadly interesting to one demographic or another such that they're co-opted into the main platform of their nearest political faction.  So yes, you can sit comfortably with your conscience that you're 'doing the right thing' but understand that in practical terms you're impotent to make policy.

Instead of having a reasonable cross-spectrum discussion about meaningful subjects like the role of government in the 21st century, we seem to be satisfied with an educational system that churns out 'citizens' with only a faint grasp on basic concepts of math or reading (to say nothing of civics, history, or art), and who are thereby easily swayed by entertaining but vapid emotionalist demagogues from both extremes.

Assume you have a budget planner who can't do basic math, and continues to budget your spending for far, far more than you make every year. Then, when things get tough, he does things like whine that "you need to just make more money" and cut off your long term investments instead of making the needed choices about maybe not buying a new gun this year, or cutting off some of the freeloading relatives who could probably get a job anyway (mainly because the guy you buy guns from takes him on junkets, and the freeloading relatives keep recommending that he's the guy for the job, respectively).
Wouldn't you FIRE him immediately for gross incompetence, if not have him outright prosecuted?

Some of us had the 'excessively sympathetic friend' in high school. The friend that, whenever something went wrong, they always 'helped us' by figuring out someone else to blame for everything. Didn't get the library book in on time? It was the LIBRARY's fault for being closed on Sunday (not you, for waiting until the very last moment to return it...). Girlfriend dumped you? She was a controlling harpy (it certainly had nothing to do with you cheating on her, that was just a mistake...). Failed calculus? Of course it was because the teacher hated you (and nothing to do with the fact that you got stoned instead of doing your homework). It was always someone else's fault.

Those are the talking heads on both sides.
They are entertainers. They are employed because they are entertaining blamers. Not because they're reasonable, not because they're wise. And we keep listening to them - the Limbaughs and Colters, the Maddows and Mahers. These are the people that make us feel better because everything is "someone else's fault".

WE are the ones who keep returning 95%+ of politicians to their seats.
WE are the ones who are ultimately responsible for putting them there.
WE have nobody to blame but ourselves.