Democrats: Junk E-Mail. Republicans: Junk Paper Mail

It's funny, for many years this pattern has held true. Democrats spam the heck out of my email box. I've gotten ten fundraising emails in the past 24 hours from the DNC and OFA (there appears to be no actual difference). The only time I've ever done anything that could be construed as asking to be on their email lists was sending Ted Kennedy a nasty message on his birthday, and being on Sen. Sherrod Brown's mailing list, and emailing the Obama Whitehouse. I get about one email per month from Brown, tops. Ted Kennedy has gone mostly silent (not completely, though, I still get email from his foundation)

Meanwhile, despite dozens, if not hundreds of emails to my Congressmen, the Bush Whitehouse, Republican state reps and senators, and campaign contributions, my level of Republican email is extremely low. But boy do they send me paper mail. Several pieces a week (which really isn't much compared to the amount of email the Democrats send me).

Slut shaming: bad. Prude shaming: good

You hear a lot about how terrible it is to "slut shame" -- to judge people and call them sluts for their sexual behaviors.

But, apparently, shaming someone because they have conservative relationship and sexual standards is all good. At least, I can't think of any reason this PuffHo article exists except to publicly shame and ridicule the man for wanting a thin, pretty, non-promiscuous girlfriend. How dare he?

Update: Jezebel has jumped on the bandwagon to humiliate this poor guy. They savage him pretty well. They even hunt up an online review he left for a Super 8 Motel to use as part of their hit on him (He wasn't all that impressed with it, by the way. His complaints sound about like what anyone's might be).

They link to his website, and I do get the impression that he's quite the odd duck, a bit of a square peg, but probably a decent guy. The only thing wrong with his list is that he dared to say it out loud and post it on the internet. We all have a list. I think most guys would say the girl he's describing sounds pretty great, and not unrealistic. But most of us don't post our lists to the world, because we don't want the kind of beating this guy is taking.

I wish the guy well. There's a lot of lonely, odd ducks out there looking for someone, and not sure how to go about finding someone.

It's just so cruel of these sites to make him a target of their venom.

What A Bitch

One of the websites I occasionally visit and comment on is glocktalk.com. It has a large collection of forums on various gun topics, and one of the ones I read is Carry Issues.

Recently on that forum was a thread called Ladies Locked and Loaded: How do I conceal my weapon?

The article referred to in the original post discussed, in part, bra holsters. An early commenter (it's all gone now, more on that later), asked if a woman would be able to conceal a Glock model 26 in such a holster.

Now, a Glock 26 is admirably compact little gun for its power and capacity, but it's still quite thick and blocky compared to the truly dimunutive concealed-carry pistols out there. Not many women could unobtrusively have one hanging just underneath their breast bone, concealed by the overhang of their breasts.

As a light-hearted way of empahasizing this point, I replied something to the effect of "Maybe if you're Christina Hendricks."

The poster said he didn't know who Christina Hendricks was. I replied that she was an actress from Mad Men and Firefly known for her "assets" (by which we understand me to mean "large breasts") and I posted a picture:

Point made, right?

There were a few ribald follow-up comments (since they're all gone, I can't evaluate or reproduce them), but also a lot of good information about women's concealed carry. Some of my own posts survived the purge.

And, yeah, the purge. That's what this is all about.

I had not continued to follow the thread very closely, but at some point, it got locked. I don't know exactly how bad it had become, but from what I know of the moderator, probably not that bad. In my opinion, he has a huge stick up his butt and locks threads for a variety of capricious reasons, including his mewling desire to appear enlightened to women like the one I'm about to introduce.

Sometime after the thread was locked, a regular poster penned this rant, So sad, just read the ladies locked and loaded thread. Honestly, what a bitch. Of course her rant is full of replies by people eager to side with her about those terrible, immature, sexist men. Count me out. I view this as anti-male bullying. Men like breasts. Get over it, lady. This type of angry, thin-skinned feminist particularly irks me. They're the type who will loudly complain that they're just as good as any man, but really can't take dealing with men on men's terms. Instead of being a woman succeeding in a man's world, they want all men to act like women in a woman's world.

There's nothing shameful about men appreciating the female form or female attributes. There's nothing immature about sexual humor or comments: we all think it, we all have urges, there's no reason not to be honest about it. Human sexuality is healthy and normal and it finds its way into all areas of our lives. Humor is also normal and healthy and humor often treads uncomfortable territory. If this women can't get past a few comments about Christina Hendricks' breasts and read the valuable information in the thread (of which there was much), that's her psychological problem, not the problem of men with completely normal psyches, hormones and sexual attractions.

Based on this post, the moderator "cleaned out the trash" and re-opened the thread. Christina went out with the "trash." Hmm, who's really anti-woman here?

The Morality Of Lying

People have innate tendencies toward both sin and virtue, and it's these competing urges and how we react to them that form the core of our moral life. Most people feel guilt when they lie, and well-raised people try to be truthful as much as they can. But there are situations where the instinct and the ethical training toward truthfulness is misplaced.

A high school teen realized he had inadvertently brought a pocket knife to a baseball game, and proactively sought out a security guard and handed it over. There were no metal detectors, no pat-downs. In all probability he could have just left it in his pocket and nobody would ever have known. But the kid was obviously raised to try to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, his moral education was incomplete. Most people realize that there are times when it is OK to lie.

When someone has broken in to your home and is threatening your family, if he asks you if there is anyone else in the house, do you have an ethical obligation to inform him of your young daughter, hiding in the basement crawlspace? No, of course not.

If you are held up and have your wallet taken by a mugger, and he asks if you have more, are you obligated to mention the envelope of cash in your inside coat pocket that you were taking to pay your rent? Of course not.

You are not obligated to be honest with criminals who mean you harm.

I posit that in many cases, government has become equivalent to a criminal adversary in our lives. Government creates thousands of technical violations and regulations that criminalize innocent behavior, then uses those regulations to rob us of our incomes and freedoms.

The pocket knife was doing no harm. It wasn't going to jump out of his pocket and stab somebody, but the criminal public school system is not this boy's friend. He has no more obligation to fess up about the knife than someone in the mugger and home invader examples above. You don't have to admit to an offense when there is no actual moral wrong being done.

You don't have to obey arbitrary authority.

When the government takes your money against your will, with threat of force, they don't call it stealing, they call it taxation, or regulatory costs.

When you lie to the government about a harmless activity to spare yourself from punishment, it's just protecting yourself.

Our government has lost legitimacy because it has criminalized harmless actions, thus making technical "criminals" out of good people. You don't have to go along with that any more than you have to offer your money to a mugger or your child to a home invader.

I think that this was understood better by older generations. We weren't raised to be as respectful of arbitrary authority. We didn't spend our lives in schools with crazy zero tolerance policies that had no relationship to reality. We didn't get punished with the force of law for normal teenage acting-out.

A few years back, I went to a local club with some friends, all of whom were at least ten years younger than me.

One of the friends had just bought several of us bottles of water right before we decided to leave. I hadn't even opened mine yet.

I saw at the door that they were refusing to let people to leave with any drinks, including these very pricey bottles of water. I wasn't about to just abandon it -- it was mine, it was paid-for -- or stand there guzzling it. So I very pointedly absolutely ignored the bouncer when he told me I couldn't take the water with me.

The bouncer really didn't know what to do. It was obvious he was used to being obeyed. But there's no law against leaving a club with a bottle of water. Their business policy doesn't carry the force of law; he couldn't lay a finger on me. "You can't leave here with that bottle!" "I just did." All he could do was bluster at me and tell me that I better never come back to the club. As if they don't want my money, or as if I couldn't live without going to that club. I think my young friends were as aghast as the bouncer. They had all just internalized that if someone in authority tells you to do something, you do it.

When did it get this bad? In my father's generation, the proper response would have been to tell the over-stepping bouncer to take a hike. Even in my generation, we had a general suspicion of arbitrary authority. But I don't think these kids do. They have grown up in a world where so many exercises of authority are arbitrary and defy common sense that they don't differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate authority. They obey authority because it is authority, not because the authority makes sense.

The downside of this is that when they do start disrespecting authority, they don't do it from any place of sound moral judgment -- they just reject authority in general. You get the Occupy movement. They weren't sure exactly what they wanted and what they were rebelling against, but  boy, they sure felt strongly about it!

I have all the respect in the world for people with the authority to catch thieves, rapists and murderers, or who collect reasonable taxes for legitimate purposes, like roads. But I don't have respect when the law becomes arbitrary. If your rifle's barrel is 16" you're a fine, upstanding citizen. If your rifle's barrel is 14" you better have a permit for a short-barreled rife or you're a despicable felon! Short-barreled rifles don't do anything (except reduce the speed of the bullet and make more noise). You don't look at a rifle and see a self-evident moral wrong due to the length of its barrel! It's arbitrary. It's capricious. It criminalizes something meaningless, and makes criminals of people who never hurt anyone. You can't respect that.

Setting Unachievable Goals By Using Moving Goalposts

At the Congressional Black Caucus dinner this year, President Obama said: "We must make this country a place where anyone who works hard can earn their way into the middle class, and until we do, we can't let up and we can't rest."

 Well, there will never be any rest, because the game is rigged. Of course people who want to remake the world never admit that things are good enough, because then what would they do with their time?

If you compare standard of living of even the poorest fifth of Americans to middle class Americans in the 19th century, we arrived. Everyone is middle class -- actually, everyone is rich -- because everyone lives better than a middle class person in the 19th century.

But we judge poverty and the "middle class" relatively. Since there will always be a poorest fifth, there will alway be "poor" people to agitate for.

It never ends.

It's Not Assault And Theft When The Enforcers Of Leftism Do It

Hillary's policy of involuntary deletes. I don't care who you are, if you grab my phone out of my hands, I'm going to consider that I was just assaulted and robbed, and I'm going to stone cold deck you. Fair warning.

Do Your Good Deeds Quietly

That's how I was raised. To this day, when a store is running one of those charity campaigns where they have the little shamrocks or hearts or pink ribbons that they post all over the store with the names of the people who donated, I find it a little unseemly. I always refuse to put my name down. You do your good works quietly. You don't boast. You don't seek recognition. To do so ruins the entire point.

Jesus told a parable "Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself : 'God, I thank You that I am not like other people : swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 'I fast twice a week ; I pay tithes of all that I get.' But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, the sinner !' I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other ; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.

To me, getting your name posted on a wall for a trivial act of charity is exalting yourself.

A recent story was Police ID mystery boy who donated savings of $10.03. Apparently the boy just non-chalantly walked in with his bag of change, said he wanted to give a donation to the police and walked out before the desk clerk could get his name.

So they posted their video surveillance of him on YouTube and Facebook to try to find someone who could identify him. OK. First -- creepy! You can't even make a quiet donation without the police tracking you down and making a big deal about it? They publicly ID'd and thanked him. I think this sends the wrong message to the kid. Charity isn't something you do expecting recognition and for people to tell you how wonderful you are. You do it because it's the right thing to do. That seems to be why he did it in the first place, and by making a big deal out of it, they risk making it more about the congratulations than the act itself.

Fortunately the kid seems to be taking it the right way, and still seems to be focused on the value of the giving. You get that kind of attitude from being raised right, not from getting pats on the back from police chiefs.

Inability To Respectfully Debate Disagreements

Ricochet has a recent article, Has Rand Paul Stepped in It? Over on Powerline, their link to the article was "Rand Paul defames Christian conservatives."

Defames? Really? Wow, he must have said some awful stuff! Then I read the article. Hmm. Not so much. The manufactured defamation comes from this statement:

I think some within the Christian community are such great defenders of the promised land and the chosen people that they think war is always the answer, maybe even preemptive war. And I think it’s hard to square the idea of a preemptive war and, to me, that overeagerness [to go to] war, with Christianity.

From the article:

Evangelical leader and supporter of Israel Gary Bauer told Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, “Senator Paul is ‘mining’ these discontents but his characterization of Christians as ‘anxious’ to go to war is an outrage and will hurt him.”
...
A senior GOP leader with close ties to the Jewish community told Rubin that Paul’s statement is “factually wrong and demonstrates a lack of knowledge and naiveté.” He said the Senator’s remark “defames Christian conservatives, which, by the way, is not smart politics for someone looking to run for president in 2016. Many conservatives are very worried about the pull on the party, led by Sen. Paul, to a neo-isolationist posture.”

An "outrage!" He "defames" Christian conservatives (said by a "senior GOP leader" who doesn't have the courage to attach his name to the statement)! OK, speaking as a Christian conservative, can we put our big boy pants on and stop pretending we're "outraged" every time someone says something about us with which we disagree? And this is by no means limited to Christian conservatives -- being "outraged" every time you are criticized seems to be the new normal.

The category "Christian conservative" is a huge one. And, certainly, encompasses people whose instincts are both peaceful and aggressive. This should not be news to anyone.

After the 9/11 attacks I found myself quite sympathetic with Ann Coulter's exhortation: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

Of course, that was never going to happen (the "convert them to Christianity" part), and lacking that fundamental transformative step, my enthusiasm for what we actually did "Invade their countries, kill their leaders and embrace peaceful 'moderate' Islam, allowing them to set up governments that deferred to Sharia law" sure waned over time.

Given that our public and political culture has deteriorated to a point that where we are so enthralled with the Cult of Diversity and Multi-Culturalism that we can't make rational judgments about our cultural superiority over a bunch of backward Middle Eastern hellholes, the best course is to simply keep out and let them kill each other as much as possible.

But clearly, there are some of us Christian conservatives who have been eager, perhaps overeager, to go to war. It's a fair depiction. As Paul describes, I would probably still characterize myself as a very strong supporter of Israel and probably more willing to go to war in its defense than I would be for many other nations. Paul's disagreement with me on this issue isn't an "outrage," it's a valuable counterpoint. I don't feel "defamed" that he called me on it. Instead I'm glad that he brings it up, so we can talk about it.

If we really could talk about it instead of ranting about how outraged and defamed we're feeling (hold on while I pause for a good cry).

So lets talk about it. How many times over the past 65 years have we had to go to war for Israel? I count, um ... zero times.

The truth is, Israel is really good at taking care of itself, and I don't think the U.S. nation as a whole is in any way in danger of diplomatically abandoning it, even under a Paul presidency. In other words, this is a big deal over nothing.

The list of issues that are of more import to this nation is virtually endless. Even if Paul treated Israel as badly as Obama as treated the U.K., hey, it's only for eight years. Also, the President is not the whole of the government. So we're talking about something that's inconsequential in a long-term relationship.

Would I accept eight years of slightly distancing ourselves from Israel for eight years of a President who respects libertarian ideals and constitutional limits on federal power? I sure would!

Obama's not exactly an enormous cheerleader for Israel, but even he has felt constrained by popular opinion to give lip service to our relationship with Israel. I doubt Paul would be any worse. He could hardly do any worse than Obama in foreign policy overall.

As for the accusation of "neo-isolationist," as others have said, that usually means "someone who doesn't like my war." We're all "isolationists" when we don't want to go to war. And shouldn't we, in most cases, not go to war?" I have no sense that Paul would refuse to defend American interests. That doesn't mean sending men to die at every turn.

History Profs Give Obama "B-." What Do HVAC Techs Say?

History professors across the nation rated Obama "B-" because he's not liberal enough.

I ask the question in my headline "What do HVAC Techs say?" I ask because when you read the article, it specifies areas that the history profs considered:

Complaints:

• The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) “did not go far enough”
• The prosecution of Bradley Manning
• The failure to close Guantanamo Bay
• Drone strikes against terrorists

Compliments:

• “Just about the only aspect of Barack Obama’s presidency which has received universal praise from historians has been the president’s Supreme Court appointments,” the pollsters state. “Both Elena Kagan and especially Sonia Sotomayor are highly respected by academics.”
• They gave him an A- in both the “integrity” and “crisis management” categories
• They also credited him for ending the Iraq War and killing Osama bin Laden.

What do all these have in common? They're all modern, current policy questions for which an advanced degree in history does not qualify one as an expert.

So, you might as well ask HVAC technicians. Their opinions are equally informed.

This is a non-random citizen opinion poll dressed up in the guise of academic expertise.

Foreign Policy For People Who Don't Understand Foreign Policy

In a recent episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart mocks Obama and Kerry's competence in the proposed intervention in Syria. However, he also mocks those who are unhappy with the solution proposed by Putin and accepted by Obama.



Stewart rants:

Who did we lose to? Sanity? "You've beat us this time, rational forethought, but we'll get you!" Who cares how we avoided a war and got a dictator to give up his chemical weapons if we avoided a war and got his dictator to give up his chemical weapons? ... oh, Putin gets the credit! If we caught Charlie Manson, who gives a beep who gets the collar?

And I get that Fox opposes the Syria peace plan because its modus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Barack Obama and all things Democratic to advance its ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust and discontent is the manna upon which it sustains its parasitic, succubus-like existence, and, uh, but--  

wild cheers from the audience

Sorry, I blacked out for a second, was I saying something? But for some reason, even CNN's Chris Cuomo seemed disappointed with the turn of events.... On the one hand, geopolitical reality just shifted one hundred percent, but on the other hand, we built this graphic

shows CNN 'Crisis in Syria' graphic.

Look, Jon, I get that you're making fun of peoples' lack of enthusiasm for the peace plan plan because your modus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Fox News and all things Republican to advance your ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust and discontent is the manna upon which you sustain your parasitic, succubus-like existence, but there are actual reasons why this peace plan is a bad idea.

For the sake of people, like Jon Stewart's viewers, who don't understand foreign policy and aren't interested in it beyond its usefulness as joke fodder on The Daily Show, let me take you back to the classic movie, The Untouchables, with Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness, Robert de Niro as Al Capone, Sean Connery as gruff Chicago cop Jim Malone, and Billy Drago as vicious mob hitman Frank Nitti.

Except, in our version, Vladimir Putin is Capone, Obama is Eliot Ness, Assad is Frank Nitti and the victims of the gass attack collectively play Sean Connery and Nitti's other victims.

This didn't happen in the movie, but imagine Ness had Nitti caught dead to rights for Malone's murder, but he suffers a crisis of courage, because he knows that if he prosecutes Nitti, he becomes target #1 of the mob. The mayor (Kerry) wonders if there's a better way out of the whole thing. Suddenly, Al Capone steps forward as a concerned member of the community. "This whole thing has been overblown. I'm sure we can settle things if we just make sure Mr. Nitti turns in his guns. I assure you, he'll suffer harsh censure by the Chicago community. And Ness caves. He lets Nitti go.

Meanwhile you're screaming at the screen, "No, you idiot! Nitti works for Capone! He's not going to give up his guns! He's not going to stop killing people!"

That's what just happened. Assad is Putin's client dictator. The chemical weapons will not be turned over, except for some tokens to mollify the press and U.N. inspectors. Assad will not be weakened. He'll get off Scot free and actually emerge with greater international credibility. And Al Capone gets to look like a frickin' hero, while making Ness look cowardly and ineffectual.

That's what just happened in Syria.

Now, as Obama likes to say, let me be perfectly clear. I was never in favor of a military intervention in Syria. That's where the Untouchables metaphor ends. Obama made unwise statement after unwise statement over the past several years and backed himself into a corner. In the long run, it's probably better that Obama look weak than we blunder into an ill-advised war. But this was a major diplomatic defeat, and it will take a Reagan-like individual following Obama's Carter impersonation to win back our prestige.

I have no doubt it can be done, but that, Mr. Stewart, is why people are not happy with the outcome.

A compromise solution might have been to outright reject the weapon turnover plan as unrealistic, Assad's stated willingness to cooperate as insufficient and unconvincing, and continued to try to build international support, but that would have been a whole lot easier if Obama hadn't already been saber-rattling for unilateral strikes without any U.N. or international approval. He could have continued to bully the European and International communities for their own cowardice in failing to address the issue -- put the onus on them, as they seem very fond of moralizing about U.S. actions and inactions. the E.U.'s collective military might is more than enough to handle a tin-pot dictator like Assad. Only express willingness to go in when U.S. forces represent less than 25 percent of those committed.

That would have put him in the moral high ground, because this was supposedly a crime against international standards (even though Syria isn't a signatory to the chemical weapons ban), so it requires an international response. U.S. interests weren't at stake in any dire way, so U.S. risk should be minimal. If the so-called international community wants international standards to have meaning, it has to show that it has some balls of its own.

Of course, it doesn't, and that would have gotten us off the hook. This isn't the movie High Noon and if the rest of the international community is too cowardly or unwilling to uphold its standards, then the U.S. doesn't have any obligation to go it alone.

Update: It's starting already.

"It's a clever proposal from Russia to prevent the attacks," one Assad supporter said from the port of Tartous, site of a Russian naval base. "Russia will give us new weapons that are better than chemical weapons," he added. "We are strong enough to save our power and fight the terrorists."

Somehow I'm not expecting an apology from Jon Stewart admitting that Neville Chamberlain Barack Obama did not achieve "peach in our time."

Boston University of Physics "Brainteaser" Demonstrates Narrowly Focused Intelligence In Action

I blogged recently about how our educational system produces people with very narrowly-focused knowledge. Here it is in action.

The brainteaser, "The Monkey and the Hunter," from the Boston University Department of Physics is as follows:

A hunter spies a monkey in a tree, takes aim, and fires. At the moment the bullet leaves the gun the monkey lets go of the tree branch and drops straight down. How should the hunter aim to hit the monkey?

1. Aim directly at the monkey
2. Aim high (over the monkey's head)
3. Aim low (below the monkey) 

The BU Physic's dept. answer, compete with equations, is based on the simple fact that gravity acts on the monkey and the bullet at the same rate, so that if you aim directly at the monkey, by the time the bullet reaches the monkey, the monkey and the bullet will have dropped the same amount. Thus, their answer is 1.

Which happens to be wrong.

What this really shows is that few BU physics students are hunters. Hunters deal with gravity-induced bullet drop every time they shoot. A rifle isn't sighted in along a straight line from the barrel to the target. The rifle is sighted in to account for the bullet drop at a known shooting distance (typically 100 yards). The shooter either manually compensates or adjusts his scope/sights on the fly if the distance is different, but the point is, the hunter's point of aim is already taking gravity's effect on the bullet into account. Unless the hunter knew for a fact back when he sighted in his rifle that he was going to be shooting at falling monkeys, he would not aim directly at the monkey, because that point of aim is already lower than a straight line, to account for bullet drop. He would have to estimate how much the bullet would drop due to gravity and adjust his aim by that much.

Unfortunately, an education in physics at Boston University doesn't equip you with any knowledge about how people deal with gravity in practical applications every day.

The U.N.: A Force For Decline?

I was reading Vladimir Putin's Op-Ed in the New York Times and it got me thinking again about the United Nations. My distrust of the organization is not new. I think it's a corrupt vehicle for greedy parasites and stealth world socialists and marxists.

But lately I've been thinking that not only the U.N. is bad, but some of what people consider the civilized norms that the institution is intended to promote are bad. In other worlds, the U.N. isn't just bad because it's a failure at what it does. It's also bad to the extent that it succeeds!

Prior to the 20th century, conquest of one nation by another was something that happened frequently. Nations were not considered to have a fundamental right of existence. Nations were created, destroyed, merged and fractured with great regularity. It was an accepted reality of global politics.

However, during the 20th century, not starting with the U.N., but growing as a general sentiment expressed in the world of international politics and in the failed League of Nations, was the idea that invading another country is wrong. Conducting wars of conquest is wrong.

This assertion is, I think, generally accepted by at least the world at large. The consequence is that international borders have become virtually set in stone. The only time they change is when a state fails so badly that it breaks up into smaller states (the origin of the world Balkanization), such as in Sudan and South Sudan and, of course, the Balkans, or, theoretically, when two independent states jointly agree to merge (has that happened in modern times?).

Many current nations didn't even exist until the early 20th century -- Iraq, Jordan, Israel or Somalia. In fact, if you look at a historical maps of Africa from the early 19th century, the borders are almost unrecognizable compared to modern maps. But now, every nation's sovereign borders are considered inviolate, and wars of aggression, no less conquest, attract international outcry.

And therein lies the problem. We have determined that even the worst nations -- nations that are essentially lawless no-man's-lands like Somalia, are "too big to fail." We acknowlege, enforce and revere their borders long after those borders cease to contain anything like an actual functioning nation state.

These facts -- new nations only form from the dissolution of sufficiently failed nations and wars of conquest are not acceptable -- are almost an ironclad recipe for slow decline. The only direction we willingly let nations go is down.

In previous times, an utterly dysfunctional land would be considered ripe for takeover by a more-functional neighboring land. This is how all successful states grew. There was no sense that Somalia had a "right" to be Somalia instead of, say, Northern Kenya.

The United States may never have been settled at all, if the right of natives to their native lands had been respected, or it may have stopped as a little coastal strip, or with the Louisiana purchase -- at whatever point it was at when the modern world's towering respect for international borders took hold.

This would have been a disaster then, and it's a growing disaster now. We view successful nations as having equal rights of existence to failed nations. We even recognize the right of our sworn enemies, Iran and North Korea, to exist.

We've abandoned the creative destruction that has been the engine of world progress, because we're no longer willing to throw away bad ideas when they're shaped like a nation. It's entirely possible that the current national borders are, in many locations, bad ideas. The idea was touched on in Iraq by the proponents of the three state solution, but even this solution stopped at the borders to Iraq.

It's as if no U.S. car company was ever allowed to go out of business. Ha, yes, I know it seems we actually think this way now. Anytime one of the big three looks like it's in real danger of failing, the government steps in. But once upon a time, the big three wasn't the big three. There was competition with Packard, AMC, Hudson, Dodge, and many others.

Imagine if the list of U.S. automobile manufacturers was frozen in 1920 with all of them being considered "too big to fail" or having a "right of existence?" What kind of dysfunctional, parasitic government tenant corporations would we be saddled with?

We enforce the existence of failed nations, unless they fall apart into smaller states. But smaller states are less capable states: they have fewer resources, fewer people, they're less capable of great things. Switzerland is a wonderful country, but nobody looks to it to lead the space race. Swiss ideals of industry and culture will never dominate the world, because the Swiss are content being an insular people. But even if tomorrow they changed their mind, if they decided to invade and acquire failing Italy to the south, the entire world would have a proverbial cow. It would never be allowed.

Instead, Italy will be able to continue with, in the words of Animal House, its "long tradition of existence" no matter how utterly it has failed as a nation. This despite the fact that Italy in the form of its current borders is less than 150 years old -- a blink of the eye, in historical terms.

This excessive respect and veneration of national boundaries serves, of course, the entrenched interests. The elite. The holders of the reins of power. It's rent-seeking and cronyism on the international level. They all make a lot of noise about the spread of freedom and democracy, but the minute one of them started spreading freedom and democracy in the way that we know worked historically -- conquest -- the rest of the world would have a fit. They're far more interested in maintaining the status quo.

So we're stuck with a lot of ossified states, coasting along on their guaranteed right to exist, until they become so utterly failed that their own citizens tear them apart from within, condemning them to chaos or Balkanization. Historically, we'd been moving away from the city-state. It was a failed model. But that's the only direction allowed, now, and that means trouble down the line.

Things That Show That Someone Is Not Being Objective

I was reading some news and got redirected to an article on a blog called The Duck of Minerva, titled, "So, you want a job in policy."

I'm sure the advice was good. I'll assume so, since, as someone with no interest in a job in policy, I really don't care.

The advice in the post is second hand from Katherine Kidder

Katherine Kidder is a Research Associate at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) where she works on the Military, Veterans and Society Program.

Ms. Kidder is a Doctoral Candidate in Security Studies at Kansas State University, where she focused on defense and development policy. She writes extensively on military retention rates, professional military education, defense budgeting, and foreign aid. Prior to coming to CNAS, Ms. Kidder was the Veteran Student Services coordinator at Kansas State University, where she aided veterans through the transition from military life to university life.

Ms. Kidder holds a Bachelor of Science in History with an emphasis on military history and a Master of Arts in Security Studies, both from Kansas State University. She is the spouse of an active duty Army officer, and remains active in the Army community.

What I found interesting were some of the blanket assertions about Washington, D.C. people and the Washington, D.C. community. If you read between the lines, what you learn more than anything is this: these people think really highly of themselves.

Start with this assertion: "All interns in this city are smart. Really. All of them." Fifty years of life have taught me that anytime you get a sufficiently large group of people together, you're going to get some idiots. Take Congress: we've got a sitting congressman who believes that the island of Guam could capsize if too many people are on it.

I have no doubt that Washington policy interns are no different. I mean, some of the people who thought that Iran would join with us to help oppose Syria's use of chemical weapons if we just showed them good enough evidence had to be interns at some point, right? But it's very important to their image that they think of themselves as the "best and brightest." I really doubt it. There are many thousands of very, very bright people who want nothing to do with that life, for sensible reasons, and many thousands of stupid people who go into that life for all the wrong reasons.

This very human tendency to ascribe superior qualities to one's own tribe has a corollary: if your tribe is the best and brightest, other tribes must necessarily be inferior. This explains the natural gravity toward statism in Washington policy and bureaucracy. "We're the brightest, so of course we know best. We know better what they need than they do themselves."

I think an assumption behind this is that all these people come from good schools, they all have M.A.s or Ph.D.s, they must be smart! I've worked with a whole lot of people with M.A.s and Ph.D.s over the years and, lord, believe me, they're not all smart. Success in advanced academics selects for a certain set of talents -- the talents of being good at studying, taking tests, writing research papers, and researching deeply into a very narrow academic area. Those skills don't make you a genius. In fact it's a truism that the more advanced the degree the less the person knows in the broader sense.

Once upon a time, we venerated the "Renaissance Man," the sort of man who could paint a masterpiece in the morning and design a new kind of water pump that afternoon. The modern university system is designed -- almost deliberately it would seem -- to ruthlessly weed out that sort of person.

Instead, the typical path is: Get a B.A. or B.S. in some broader but still tightly targeted area, such as Ms. Kidder's history degree, then find a narrower area such as "Security Studies" and pick a thesis in that that hasn't already been done to death by 10,000 other grad students. Then, find an even more esoteric specialization within your doctoral field (in Kidder's case, Security Studies, again) to base your dissertation on, and after many years of study, you are an absolute expert in a very narrow, obscure area of knowledge.

To characterize such a person as "smart" just based on that degree is to demean the notion of what it is to be smart (no offense to Ms. Kidder, I'm just using her academic path as an example). Even worse, it takes genuine smartness and buries it deep in a blinkered academic education.

The university pays lip service to the renaissance ideal by implementing a common core curriculum at the undergraduate level, to supposedly ensure that engineers get some humanities courses and humanities majors have to have some exposure to science and math, but it's widely understood that these core requirements are a joke and that, overall, the system is designed to turn out computer scientists and engineers that know nothing about politics, history and literature, history and English majors who can barely calculate a tip, and economists who have no idea how to run a business.

I work every day with people like this: they are very competent at their jobs. In that respect, I suppose they are smart, but take them outside their comfort zone and they're babes in the woods. Knowing a lot about military retention rates doesn't mean you know a thing about, say, economics. But, my observation of this crew has told me that they simply assume that since they're very well-educated in their areas, they're smart enough to make judgments in many areas where they have towering ignorance. Their culture encourages this.

The strange thing about this town is that what you claim to be an expert on, your [sic] are perceived to be an expert on until proven otherwise (which can be a really good thing or a dangerously bad thing!)

 Hmm. That doesn't sound very smart, does it? In fact, it sounds suspiciously like these highly credentialed people are assuming that credentials equal actual expertise and, even worse, working competence. I suppose that's comforting to them: "I have a Ph.D. This piece of paper means I must be smart!" The assertion that this "can be a really good thing" is never explored or proven. I think the "dangerously bad" part is obvious. It does certainly fit in with the perception of us outsiders that D.C. is filled with charlatans, frauds, sycophants and empty status-seekers.

This is the town that has been trying to sell us on the genius of Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Somehow, I'm not convinced.

Just as in Academia, publications carry a lot of weight. But the difference in Washington is that volume kind of counts for more than quality (I know…it makes me shudder).

 Another admission that form is more important than substance.

So start getting your name out there with smaller pieces- op-eds, pieces in smaller publications, etc. Of course, it never hurts to have a piece placed in ForeignPolicy.com or Foreign Affairs- but when in doubt, get something out there. And this is a great way to get an edge on your “expertise.”

It's the unconscious details that mean the most. The "expertise" in scare quotes is particularly telling. Not real expertise, just so-called "expertise."

Do you suppose people like this, a tightly-knit, highly competitive crowd with an inflated sense of their self-worth, an unsubstantiated faith in credentialed academics, and an extreme eagerness to ingratiate itself with senior people in the "really tiny" communities they're competing to be part of  might be susceptible to, oh, group think? Yeah. me too.

Who Needs Pravda When You've Got The New York Times?

It's official: The New York Times is the U.S. propaganda outlet for Vladimir Putin

A Red Line

I'm going to say that Barack Obama has crossed a Red Line with his incompetent handling of Middle East foreign policy.

A year from now. I fully intend to assert that, hey, it wasn't my Red Line, it was the world's Red Line, and the credibility of the world is at stake if they don't get rid of Barack Obama.

Slate "Likes" Irony On Privacy

Slate magazine has this good article on safeguarding your children's online privacy. The article focuses on how Facebook works to tie your real life to your online identity, is building facial recognition databases, behavioral databases and social connection databases that extend well beyond your Facebook friends list. This should give you pause not just for your children's privacy of course.

The irony? You can't post to Slate unless you have an account on one of the big social networking sites: Facebook, Yahoo, Google or Twitter. Of course, I have to have a Google account to use Blogger. But I try to diversify. I rarely post elsewhere using this account. I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to connect the dots, and Google knows a disturbingly large amount about me, but I work to limit it.

I don't have Facebook or Twitter accounts. The first because Facebook is simply nothing but a giant data collection engine and because I find Twitter to be the intellectual equivalent of a lobotomy. I also won't sign in on Yahoo or Google to outside services because I don't want to cross-link all that info.

Many sites suck up your entire contact list when you sign on with Google or Yahoo, plus they all cross-pollinate with tracking cookies, and then link that info back to your social networking identities even on third-party sites. See that little "like" button on your favorite site? Facebook knows you were there, even if you didn't click "like." If the site doesn't have a "like" button, they're probably serving ads from a major ad agency, and the fact that you viewed the ad is purchaseable info. All they have to do is link the ad cookie with your Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr cookies and they can add that info into the massive online profile of Everything You've Ever Done On the Internet. That exploratory foray into broccoli-fetish.com? That Google search for "hot sexy livestock?" Oh, yeah, they know about all that. And they can tie it to you. Individually. Probably to your real name.

What all that means is, at Slate, and many sites, unless you're willing to buy into the whole privacy-robbing social networking industrial complex, they don't want to hear from you. In fact, the sites that don't tie into one of the major social networking sites or one of the commenting service giants like Disqus or Livefyre, are getting few and far between.

You can try to obfuscate, but unless you're willing to live the life of a serious privacy wonk, using Tor and anti-tracking software, you're probably failing.

So: write articles about protecting your privacy. Require you to sacrifice all your privacy to comment.

Nice.

Attacking Syria: Why Us?

The ambivalence of many Congressmen mirrors my own. You can't wage war by bureaucracy and with pre-defined limits (and bombing another country is making war, no matter how you try to "nuance" it). If you establish to the world beforehand that your military actions will be narrowly defined and follow a pre-established script, you fundamentally undercut one of the prime fears of your enemy -- that he doesn't know how far you are willing to go in pursuit of your goals. We saw this demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq once the wars there were put on timetables. Afghanistan suddenly got a lot more dangerous for our troops, and in Iraq whatever good we had done for the country swiftly unraveled.

I reject the notion that the chemical weapons represent any more threat to U.S. interests than the conventional weapons both sides are using. The reality is that the U.S. is acting as morality cop for a conflict it has little interest in, otherwise. And why? Obama and the anti-war left have repeatedly chastised the U.S, for its interventionist arrogance, claiming that this arrogance has soured the world's opinion of the U.S. Fair enough, if that's what they think, let's follow that to its logical conclusion. We have here a situation where no major nation but France seems to feel that the situation warrants intervention. So why do we presume that it falls on us? If this is such an important humanitarian disaster, why is it *our* job to do something about it when the U.K., Germany, Australia, Canada, India, Canada, Israel and every other supposedly free western nation with money or an army feels like it's not worth stepping in?

If the chemical weapons are so bad, let the oh-so-civilized, nuanced EU do something about it. Let Sweden, whose Nobel Peace Prize Committee is so willing to engage in frivolous anti-Americanism pony up some blood and money instead of mere words.