Gloom and Doom? Not really.

In response to a question about the US economic security:
"According to this article (http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/16/news...dex.htm?iid=EL), Tim Geithner believes that America will reach a financial bankruptcy unless the congress raises the debt ceiling. My question to you is, are you worried about what's about to happen and what are you overall thoughts?
I'm not trying to be malicious or anything. On the contrary, another financial crisis would affect the rest of the world as well."
My reply:

As long as Starbucks/Caribou/Dunn Bros continue to be successful selling $5 cups of coffee, we're fine.

In reality, while the economic indicators for the country are bad, those for the rest of the world are worse.  Ultimately, the stability of a currency is backed by perception, and the US (for all its utterly stupid policies, co-opted legislators of both parties, truly f*cked spending priorities, etc.) is far, far more stable by any meaningful measure than any comparable state.  This means that when the shat hits the fan, investors will continue to flee to the USD for security.  Now, the almost-certain money-flood that's coming from Congress (inconceivable that they suddenly grow testicles and learn to spend only what they have) guarantees that the USD value will plummet in the short term, but the fear of bond calls is grossly overblown; China might as well put a gun in its mouth before it crash-calls on US bonds which would simultaneously destroy the US economy and vaporize a significant fraction of China's wealth.

Further, as much as we cry about energy dependence, the Saudis understand it far better than the US public (and some policymakers) - the US is energy dependent only as a matter of convenience.  If I had any respect at all for our government, I'd say it was brilliant; the US has ample domestic coal, NG, and yes, even oil reserves for at least a century of current use.  Consuming Middle-Eastern oil first that's hard to ship, hard to protect, and closer to our enemies would be a geopolitical masterstroke.  Energywise, we're fine.  Foodwise, we're abundantly secure, grossly so.  In terms of strategic raw materials, again, we're amply supplied domestically, and only using those of other countries because their lower labor costs and our high environmental standards make them currently less-attractive to extract.  So if tomorrow a wall dropped around each country at its borders preventing any international movement or trade, 10 years later the US would still be almost perfectly unchanged.  I don't believe there are many other first-world states that could say the same thing.  Finally, physically, we're totally secure from even such (seemingly outdated) concepts as invasion.  There's no state (even China) that could credibly threaten the existence of the US for at least the next 50-100 years.

Such surplus and security has in fact probably allowed our government to survive such stupid decisions.

I could go on in detail for a while, but suffice to say that, barring some sort of threat of civil war, or a stunning change in circumstances for the EU*, Japan, Russia, or China, the US will remain the least-f*cked-up state with the best outlook in the developed world for at least 50 years.
* note particularly that the EU's prognosis is far worse than they let on; they are far less transparent than the US government, particularly in terms of the economic circumstances of the PIGS today.  Further, the EU has gotten a free-ride courtesy of the pre-collapse Soviet Union; the raising of the Iron Curtain gave Western Euro companies a nearby hinterland full of people desperate to work hard for low wages to fuel Euro commercial growth.  That honeymoon is almost over, as in the next decade workers in Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia wonder why they can't have the same standard of living, work, and wages of their French/German/British peers.

The histrionic pronouncements from Washington DC are politics, although the political brinkmanship is getting ever-more irresponsible.  I'm not saying that this country isn't past due for some much needed economic suffering (one can only operate on a fiscal premise of 'denial' for so long), but the struts underpinning the country itself are the same sturdy footings that foretold the US Great Power future in the 19th century.

China - not the threat it's painted to be.

What I'm really not clear on is what seems to be a apples-and-oranges comparison going on in the strategic community regarding the potential threat posed by China.

China - as it is - is not a military threat. Sure, it poses an economic threat, but this is largely of our own making, both in terms of debt burden (self-inflicted, and in extremis something that offers them leverage only as long as we accept it), currency (again, self-inflicted by world monetary authorities who refuse to hold China to 1st-world currency standards), etc. 

But while China is clearly a dominant power, one might even say a regional superpower, they utterly lack any ability to project this power outside their immediate region short of lobbing ICBMs. THIS is the defining point of a global superpower (and we discovered the limits of such all-or-nothing leverage from about 1950-1980). Granted, they have a billion-man army. They may even be 'unassailable' in conventional terms, and may able to impose their will militarily on any regional actor like Korea or Japan - that doesn't mean they're a threat to the US.

In short, people seem to be comparing China's 'turtled' strengths with the US's (over?)extended might, and concluding that logical extrapolation of the former means the two will be equivalent in a couple of decades.

Hardly. The threat of China as a 'global superpower' that can contend with the US worldwide, posited for 2035, 2050, 2025 depending on who you're talking to and what his agenda is, would HAVE to include projection capability...which itself introduces orders of magnitude of vulnerability and exposure. To suggest that the US has anything to actually fear from Chinese force-projection on THAT playground assumes an almost fanciful level of Chinese buildup (akin to late-1930's Germany) along with American inattention for a double-handful of decades at least.

No, we have to understand the Chinese buildup for what it is today: an expansion of capabilities certainly, an increased lethality in the neighboring seas which has the bargain double-purpose utility to China of both being useful against other regional entities as well as useful in denying US its (soon-to-be-former) ability to operate with impunity on the water, wherever it chose to. Did we really believe that was an eternal franchise anyway? Maintaining it (if even possible) would require colossal and nonsensical budgetary investments. But their denial of our ability to rummage through their front-pockets at will is hardly a threat to anyone outside of their arms' reach.

Certainly, our commitments to our regional partners require that we expend some effort to maintain our ability to operate in their behalf - to passively accept that certain seas are no-go zones would be foolish. But let's not confuse interests-at-one-remove with any actual denigration of our ability to defend ourselves, even if it seems convenient in an era of shrinking budgets to paint it so.

Ultimately, China won't be the only regional power whose capabilities circumscribe our operational capabilities near their shores, merely the first. We need a robust strategy to face these actors over the next century, and it cannot be by simply building more ships, planes, and subs - that's a dead-end strategy and vulnerable to technological breakthroughs that obsolete our massive investments in bulk (ala the cell-phone networks in the 3rd world vs. hardline phone systems in the 1st). I personally believe that the answer to this is going to be found in orbital capabilities, taking away the 'flatland' operational assumptions that inform a boundary-defining strategy anyway. But that's another subject, for another time.

Finally, the US Navy's assertions that we need to desperately fear the untested, nearly operationally useless* anti-ship ballistic systems despite their lack of actual testing is more likely to be a politically- or budgetarily-relevant assessment; it's hardly credible as a military one.

*the utility of a ballistic-missile-based antiship system is simply nil. Short of global thermonuclear war (where all gloves are off), the idea of a system with the relatively puny goal of sinking a single ship (even a really important one) appearing to all expected sensor systems as a potential ICBM is crazy. That would be as useful as making people think your switchblade is an assault rifle - simply bringing it out will immediately & grossly overescalate a confrontation to the point that your actual ability to inflict damage is made meaningless by the response you've inspired. It's politically useless. Thus the environment in which it could be deployed would already presuppose a complete all-out nuclear war in which case it would probably be more useful to actually HAVE a MiRV'd nuke warhead on that missile, rather than a single shipkiller ANYWAY. It just doesn't make sense, and the fact of China's pushing ahead with it suggests that either its a Potemkin challenge (unlikely they could pull that off for long) or a desperate dice-roll of a strategy being ironically validated by the US naval defense community's overreaction.

Enough already about "the cops are bad"

For the people whinging about the 'culture of corruption' and brutality of the police, I have a couple of points:

1) so far I have only seen utterly unsupported assertions - anecdotal evidence quoted as "a trend" or some stoner complaining that "all the cops are" (whatever). Further, any statistics that are shown tend to prove the opposite, that increasing allegations against police are NOT leading to more substantiated cases, are claimed to be "proof" that the cops "control" the system and protect their own from prosecution. Kind of like Global Warming, it's convenient when you posit something that all evidence can be twisted to support.

2) *nobody* making these claims can possibly know anything about the history of police departments and police work, particularly in urban areas. Compare 

a) police departments and systems of ombudsmen and recourse for - not to mention media and public sympathy for - people (particularly minorities, immigrants, etc.) who believe they've been mistreated today to say, the 1970s? The 1950s? The 1920s? The 1890s? Read about the police system in New York 1895-1897 when Teddy Roosevelt was NYC Police Commissioner. 

b) levels of procedure, both in terms of breadth and depth, applicable to police actions in dealing with the public today vs. the same dates. These procedures are almost universally meant to protect officers AND THE PUBLIC.

c) oversight and supervision of the 'beat cop' (or 'patrol officer' today) vs. the same dates.

d) the general level of violence used against suspects vs. the same dates. PARTICULARLY in terms of (admittedly subjective) the likelihood of lethal force being used against cops vs. the use of lethal force BY police, same timeframes.

e) corruption in law enforcement, same timeframes.


You might assert that today's police have attitude issues, are domineering, brutal, resort too quickly to brutal force and are just generally a-holes. I'd assert that a certain personality type has ALWAYS been drawn to police work, and that while police officers exhibit generally the SAME bell-curve of saints/sinners as any general population I'd concede that there probably is a little 'bubble' of personalities in the domineering/controlling area. HOWEVER, I'd simultaneously assert that this has absolutely not changed over time, while the systems emplaced over the last hundred years (and particularly in the last 20-30 years) *greatly* increase the ability of police departments to 'weed out' the outliers, psychotics, and general bad apples far better than they used to. (In fact, one could argue that for a long time, early police departments didn't really want to weed these guys out, except for the real crazies.)

In short, I think anyone who believes that police officers/departments are worse than before is either arguing from a position of complete ignorance of what "before" was like, and/or simply someone bearing a grudge against police for some slight or injustice (perceived or real, cops are of course not perfect) done to them.

This entirely disregards that I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that police officers jobs have gotten less stressful and less dangerous over time. This is a whole other issue that would sound too much like a defensive justification, so I haven't even gone into it here.

The new attack on Obama: LOL

OK, I'm not fond of Obama, but this latest one is hilarious.


http://www.truth-out.org/sai-v-obama-et-al-hawaiis-legal-case-against-united-states65850


In short, Hawaii's not actually part of the US.


Seriously?


It may shock some people (particularly the Left), but ultimately, there's NOTHING behind the existence of (as far as I'm willing to spend the time thinking about exceptions) any modern state except consensus. There's no document that says "hey, here's the borders Germany's entitled to", or "here's the limits of China" - except insofar as such boundaries were IMPOSED by outside actors strong enough to enforce their limits, and conformed to by the state itself out of a broader sense of what's in its interests.

Look, country A conquers country B. Or, in the case of Hawaii, country B has an "indigneous" (hahahahaha) group 'seize power' and then cede themselves to country A. There's no title, no property document that says "A owns country B" now. If there is, there's ALWAYS some way to impugn it.

There is no such thing as international law. None. What we call international LAW are simply norms of behavior where states have agreed to cooperate in ways that MIMIC the actions of law across borders, but the simple fact is that there is no supra-national organization that has the ability to enforce anything - it's all voluntary.

Everything in the relationships of states - whether they are currently sovereign, independent states, or subject formerly sovereign states such as Hawaii, Scotland, the Navaho, or Bavaria - has to do with POWER. In many cases, the initial absorption of the subject state is a simple question of military force. Ultimately the absorbed state can either stay rebellious, or reconciles itself with its subject status. Eventually (2 generations? 3?) control becomes the norm, and no longer needs to be actively mandated. 

Note that in such cases, absorption is not always resisted nor even always negative. States too follow enlightened self-interest. Often the subject can or does rationalize the advantages of being a smaller part of a larger state as a more secure, economically advantageous situation. Independence as a theory is nice, but in practical terms geopolitics is a world red in tooth and claw, and the small or young are often the first preyed upon.


My point is, what happened, happened. Queen Liliuokalani's protests and American concessions notwithstanding, if the US took down the Hawaiian flag and raised their own flag, the fact that it stands uncontested in practical terms makes it reality. Objecting to the legal formalities (the Congressional act of annexation can't have been legal, according to Dr. Sai, because US laws don't apply internationally) doesn't make the ownership of Hawaii any less real. That just makes it arguably an act of conquest instead of legality. Big deal.

The Grotian view of international norms, and legal bases for actions, has been demonstrably false for CENTURIES. Countries conform to norms that they agree with, and ignore ones that they don't, and won't agree unless compelled. Thus any sort of legal basis for the annexation of territory will ALWAYS be contestable later by some hedge-lawyer because SOMEONE will always object, and always have some rationalized basis for their objections...and unless & until that person has an army available to change the current reality, they will remain as irrelevant as ever.

The second point is that as a scholar, Dr. Sai's intellectual credibility is doubtful:
1) he contends that he "...step(s) aside from politics and power and look at Hawaii not through an ethnic or cultural lens, but through the rule of law..." - bull****. Dr. Sai is Hawaiian. To suggest that he's not taking his stance for ethnic (& political) reasons is complete nonsense. Whether his primary motivation is Hawaiian independence, or against Obama, and one goal simply dovetails conveniently with the other, his denial is disingenuous. This isn't to say that his point is de facto wrong, but to obviously perjure himself immediately doesn't add to the value of his conclusions.
2) anyone that is trying to make an academic or legal point and then likens himself to Morpheus in The Matrix isn't really doing anything to incline the rest of us take him seriously.

MN GOP are stupid.

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/eve...cle/id/185541/


"The Minnesota GOP is punishing two former governors and a former U.S. senator for backing the Independence Party candidate in the governor’s race, according to Minnesota Public Radio.

MPR reports that delegates to the party’s state central committee meeting voted 59-55 Saturday to bar 18 Republicans from party activities for two years, including the 2012 Republican National Convention."

I hate my state. The majority of the people in MN are either card-carrying communists, bleeding hearts, or white-guilt limousine liberals. The Republicans have gone from a centrist party to a cabal of right-wing zealots whose entire political platform starts and ends with abortion.

I can understand the party's anger with Carlson.  I thought he was a decent governor who was a little too socially liberal for me but a great administrator and conciliator, particularly when faced with MN's traditional Democratic perma-lock on the house and senate. Unfortunately, he seems to have some sort of personal baggage over Pawlenty, and (seemingly and mistakenly) blamed him for the rightward swing of the GOP.

Because of this personal issue with Pawlenty, Carlson has let himself be used by the Left in this state starting with MPR as their 'cat's paw' Republican, trotting him out to publicly criticize just about everything Pawlenty has done.  That's sad, but the humiliation of playing such an obvious role is its own punishment.

But Quie? Really? I met the guy right after his governorship and he always seemed to be a warm, likable person as well as centrist politically.  In MN to win the governorship you COULDN'T be far-right wing.  This is a blue state, sorry, but that's a fact.

The GOP nationally has always been a minority party, and thus has always been a little better at marching together even if we disagree on minor issues...we've simply had to, to be successful at all. This repudiation of a couple of Republican icons in the state is just stupid, and shows how disconnected the MN GOP is.

I've regretted my vote for Ventura for years, and I'm generally a "party" voter, but this act by the GOP has made me accept that I need to seriously consider the next IP candidate regardless of winnability.  Nice job, morons.

There Will Be Blood - a review

160 minutes of overacting, overdirecting, set appropriately to a distracting overbearing score.  Reviewed here in an appropriately wordy style.

Part of it is that I guess I’m simply not a fan of Daniel Day-Lewis; I first enjoyed his portrayal of Natty Bumpo immensely.  Since then I’ve watched him in Gangs of New York, My Left Foot, Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Age of Innocence…and in every one I’ve practically winced through his performance.  There are some great actors who play roles effortlessly, slipping into roles without us ‘noticing’ that they’re an actor.  DDL is precisely the opposite – he is clearly working so terrifically hard to ‘be’ whoever he’s playing, and it seems that we’re meant to notice.  It’s the acting equivalent to deliberately coloring outside the lines so we can see what neat crayons he’s using.  Perhaps it’s a self-conscious theatricality that plays better on a stage & footlights, but somehow he’s managed to overact even larger-than-life, bombastic roles like The Butcher in GoNY, or this character Daniel Plainview in TWBB.

In TWBB the first problem is that it’s derived from an Upton Sinclair story, Oil!, so we expect that we’re going to see a sermon on the evils of capitalism.  Ironically, this turns out to be one of the lesser ills, as the director used only the basic setting and (according to IMDB) about 150 pages of the novel as source material – the rest is made from whole cloth.  I’ll therefore actually reserve judgment on Sinclair’s contribution to this until I actually read the story myself.

The film starts very promising; roughly the first 10 minutes of the movie are entirely without dialogue, and tell a solid, interesting prologue over the span of a decade before the first words flow.  Unfortunately, the first words are jarring: despite the character’s origins in Fon-du-Lac, WI, DDL allegedly chose the director John Huston as his vocal model.  Odd, as Huston was from Nevada and his cadences were utterly non-Midwestern.  More importantly, he had a characteristic method of speaking that was both pretentious and artificial; it was precise, over enunciated, and almost as if he was always reading a script for transcription.   If you’ve never heard it, you might instead remember Bugs Bunny’s line from Space Jam “I’m a Shakespearean Actor!” – pretty much the same delivery.  It could be that DDL was going precisely for this, some sort of grand huckster-showman delivery with a fourth-wall wink to the audience that everyone else in the movie seems to be “buying it”, something that simply doesn’t work on film.

At first I thought this was an actual biography; characters drift in and out, growing or losing importance based on seeming externalities to the story that are never explained.  It may be an effort at realism.  Unfortunately what can be forgiven in a portrayal of reality (which necessarily must be somewhere bounded to fit into a retelling) ends up just being chaos on the screen.  Who  are these people?  Is he important?  Wait, where did he come from?  Certainly we care nothing for this parade of shadows that voice a few lines and then depart.  His adoptive son, HW, is potentially a meaningful character – Plainview adopts him after one of his early workers is killed, leaving the boy an orphan.  In the book, he’s apparently adopted for his usefulness - dragged along much as a showpiece, a hood-ornament displaying Plainview’s “family” nature.  This isn’t successfully brought into the film; he’s shadowing behind Lewis, trailing along mostly ignored but then occasionally the object of real (apparent) affection.  Why?  Does he really love the boy?  Like Plainview’s occasional bursts of violence and temper, these are seemingly inserted randomly, apparently meant to give the characters some “depth”.  Unfortunately, complexity without consistency – allowing the audience to build a semblance of logic behind it – just comes off as incoherence. 

The actor (Paul Dano) who had apparently already been shot in early scenes as Paul Sunday (whose revelation to Plainview about oil on his family’s property really is the initial dramatic incident of the film), was allowed to also play the “other brother” Eli Sunday, the director rationalizing that they happened to be identical twins.  Ironically, this spins the audience a hint of subtle dramatic promise – when Plainview, having bought the information after a tense negotiation with Paul, goes surreptitiously to inspect the property under the guise of quail hunting, he meets Eli.  To all appearances, it’s the same young man that sold him the information, yet Eli acts as if he’s never met Plainview before?  Was Paul a false name?  Is Paul/Eli playing some sort of double game against his father, the property owner?  Regrettably, we eventually figure out that it’s not drama; it’s confusion and director laziness.  No, Eli the religiously-obsessed stay-at-home son who is takes the role of the community antithesis to Plainview (never quite so clearly delineated as such, either) just HAPPENS to be the identical twin to the opportunistic and canny Paul, who never shows up again in the film.

Part of it is the character of Daniel Plainview – Sinclair is writing very much as an anti-Rand (aynti-Rand?) highlighting the deliberate isolation and loneliness of the wealth- and power-obsessed.  Unfortunately, while showing how Plainview travels alone through life the director is too successful –he’s cut off from the audience too.  We simply don’t care what happens to him.  He neither kicks the dog to make a proper villain, nor demonstrates any character development that might make him an anti-hero.   Like John Galt he starts out as a 2d caricature of obsession, stays a 2d character of obsession, and ends a 2d character of obsession.  

Finally, not least – I had to make some mention of the horrible scoring.  The best movie scores enhance the picture, building drama at dramatic scenes, suspense at suspenseful scenes, etc.  Bad scores make you notice the emotional manipulation by ham-handed and overloud themes that blatantly attempt to coerce you into feeling a way that the film fails to.  The worst score, I discovered with TWBB, would be one that is so repeatedly ham-handed and overloud that not only are you not moved, but they blare into oversaturation and annoyance.   I can’t recall another movie in recent memory that caused me to reach for the ½ mute button for minutes on end, to wait until some apparently dialogue made it worth bringing up the sound again.

I rarely do this, but I confess I stopped watching after an hour and a half, with more than an hour left in the picture.   I freely admit that I may have missed some great last-reel payoff that caused the entire film to dramatically coalesce into some great work of art that justified the entire experience.  I submit that I doubt it – I disbelieve that a director could make the bulk of a movie so painful and boring without hinting at some signs of brilliance that would suggest a smooth resolution.  If they were there, I certainly missed them.  Boy, did I miss them.

I wish the future was closer...

I feel like a bit of a Pollyanna posting this, but...it's something I keep coming back to:


No president recently (Obama, Bush, Clinton) nor either party in Congress has really been willing to put their money where their mouths are as far as space exploration.

I'd contend that in terms of benefit to humanity in general, it's a far better use of resources than just about any other giant-government project, particularly wasting our time, money, and lives trying to drag some archaic tribes* into the 21st century, or saving people from medical consequences of their life choices.

* a goodly chunk of the south Asian subcontinent, as well as the bulk of Africa)

An intensive focus on materials-science IMO would get us over the hump in terms of the industrial-scale production of tensile-strength material suitable for a space elevator. We're GOOD at solving big engineering questions.

The construction of a station in high orbit (let the stupid, worthless ISS burn to cinders) would be a steppingstone to
a) orbital mining operations that could essentially end any need to lift resources into orbit, and even radically change the availability of raw materials on earth - I'd personally reject any plan to bring an asteroid anywhere toward earth...a one-in-a-billion chance of error would still be several orders of magnitude too risky.
b) nearly perfect security for tech-capable nationstates. The ability to quickly field "brilliant pebbles" that would be in practical terms immune to neutralization in a first strike would ensure that any state with the capability would effectively have a permanent second-strike ability to annihilate any opponent, regardless of what happens on earth. People may hate MAD as a policy, but the fact is, it worked as well as it needed to.
c) exploration and exploitation of the rest of the solar system becomes simple and cheap enough to become the province of business, not just government: nearly inexhaustible energy supplies around the Jovian planets, abundant hydrocarbons, the resources to sustain ourselves once we're out there, are out there.

Ultimately, the dispersal and distribution of humanity across the solar system would provide significant redundancy and survivability of the species in the case of catastrophe on earth. Pick your poison: economic catastrophe, political conflict, geological disaster, heck, a goof with the LHC or even extraterrestrials sick of our 'noise' in the neighborhood pitching a relativistic boulder at earth from light-years away - there's no end to the list of potential world-enders. And as we become more technologically capable, our ability to fsck up our entire planet is growing.

The first step is a BIG one, but once we get up there, I'm pretty sure humanity's natural urges would make the spread automatic.