Yea, so it’s been a little over a week since my last post, partly due to a crazy patrol schedule and partly due to a lack of anything to write about. I’m amazed at how bored I actually am, nothing is going on at all; I’m almost willing to bet that I could go running through my platoon AO without gear or my weapon and I’d be completely untouched.
I’m not the only one feeling the boredom, on one of our patrols we paid 4 donkey cart drivers to race, the stipulation, one soldier on the back of each donkey cart. My donkey lost, it tried to kick it’s driver.
Finally someone that has actually bothered to think about how to make world peace a reality. His name is Thomas Barnett and he gave an awesome presentation at TED. His wikipedia entry states this:
The group also noticed that globalization has caused a fairly common rule set to be shared between a great many countries around the world. States that have benefitted from globalization and begun to share in the wealth and prosperity associated with that are also losing interest in waging war with one another. Participants in the project noticed that once the per capita income of a country increases to about US$3000 per year, war essentially disappears. There are a few places where this hasn’t exactly been the case, but it seems to largely hold true for now.
Another interesting thing to note was that, of U.S. military deployments around the world since 1990, virtually all have taken place in countries that do not meet that level of income. Examining the regions more thoroughly, it was also noted that the countries have very little flow of people, information, or investment money across their borders. This all leads to the idea of these countries being “disconnected” from the outside world, running on rule sets that are different from that of globalized societies.
Barnett has termed the globalized countries the “Functioning Core,” or simply “the Core.” The other countries are part of the “Non-Integrating Gap,” or simply “the Gap.” The Gap has been shrinking as globalization has expanded. Since most terrorists seem to come from the Gap, he believes that the American military should focus on building partnerships with “seam states,” countries bordering the Gap, to stabilize those regions. Stable states would bring more investment and more connectedness with the outside world, therefore progressively shrinking the Gap. The end result of all of this, if it proves to be successful, would be nothing less than the end of interstate warfare on the planet, and probably a significant reduction in intrastate warfare and other problems like terrorism.
You want actual world peace? In countries that are capable you assist the development of free markets and democracy. In more intractable countries you invade and start from scratch forming a democratic free markets system. Any other solution for world peace, like Obama’s solution to just sit down and listen, is simply bullshit.
Gives an interesting talk at Ted. Make sure you hear the part about how modeling humans is best down through intention. And using science as model is not so successful. Its at the 20 minute mark.
Its simple. You want to stop mass shootings you make owning hand guns easier and not harder.
The subsequent investigation lead detectives to believe that Villagomez entered the bar and at some point began firing multiple rounds. At least two of these rounds struck and killed the other two decedents, Jose Torres age, 20 and his brother Margarito Torres, age 19 both of Winnemucca. At some point during this shooting spree Villagomez allegedly stopped and according to witnesses reloaded his high capacity handgun and began shooting again.
It was at this point that the second shooter, the Reno resident, produced a concealed handgun and proceeded to fire upon Villagomez who succumbed to his wounds. The Reno resident was in possession of a valid Concealed Carry Permit issued through the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office.
U.S. steel industry shipments of 106 million tons in 2007 exceeded the industry’s 1970 shipments by 16 percent. Output per worker has soared: in the 1970s producing a ton of steel required 12 man-hours; today it requires 1.2 man-hours. Several billion dollars of new green-field investments are being made by foreign and domestic producers in U.S. production capacity, which is a sure sign that those who know the industry best have faith in America’s manufacturing future.
Over at TCS Daily, Paul Betson has a piece looking at how the candidates use their respective political labels.
Americans learned over several decades what liberalism, at least modern liberalism, was all about. Contrary to some claims that conservatives, in a sinister plot, defamed the word, liberalism did a pretty good job defaming itself: from the anything-goes ethos of the 1960s to radical war protestors, from tax-and-spend government and welfare policies to lax criminal justice, pacifism abroad, and a wide-ranging contempt for the institutions and values of American life, liberals took what had been the dominant political current in American politics and made it into a pejorative term. Today, while centrist American voters may blanch at some of the Republican Party’s positions, they have no wish to go back to governmental progressivism.
If they did, Obama-never one to miss a rhetorical trick–would be resurrecting the word “liberal” as change we can believe in.
Obama’s evasion of the implications of “liberal” are worth noting by contrast with conservatism, a “label” that most politicians of that persuasion accept gladly, if they aren’t already wrapping themselves in the mantle. Whatever the despair of the Bush years, conservatism does not come saddled with the hardened negatives that centrists and independents tend to associate with liberalism. For many, it still represents sensibility and practicality, as well as success, dating back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The Bush years have in fact not discredited conservatism, a point made suggestively–if, one senses, accidentally–by, of all people, Michael Dukakis.
“‘What’s conservative about invading Iraq?” he asked in a Washington Post story. “What’s conservative about a $400 billion deficit?” Though Dukakis went on to say, shades of 1988, that “The terms have lost their meaning,” his rhetorical questions underscore that even liberals don’t connect the Bush administration’s failures to traditional conservative principles. They criticize Bush by holding his policies up to conservative standards–and finding him lacking. What Bush has discredited is not conservatism, but the Republican Party. The number of Americans answering to that party identification has slipped markedly since Bush entered the White House.
I support the principle of Separating Church and State. Unfortunately I dislike the noise of more young people indulging in drugs and alcohol when the state does not mandate that places of business stay closed on Sunday. A recent study done by economist has shown that:
the negative consequences for individuals or society from loosening secular constraints and they found those consequences in behaviors associated more with Saturday night than Sunday morning.
Thats why I fully support blue laws, which are laws forbidding stores to be open on Sunday morning when people should be going to church. While in general separating church and state is a good idea, we see in this case its better to compromise that principle just a little bit to prevent young people form turning to drugs and alcohol. In case you hadn’t figured it out, I’m being sarcastic. I accept the noise of increased drug abuse by adhering strictly to the principle of separating church and state.
I suppose in matters of religion someone like Darwin will rediscover his commitment to principle even in the face of increased drug abuse. It’s nice to know that principle matters when you already dislike the institution the principle is keeping in check.
On Wednesday, I reported that the John McCain campaign got threatened by the New York Times with negative coverage of the medical-records release unless the campaign issued the paper an invitation to the press pool. The Times’ Washington bureau never responded to a request for a response to my queries on that story, but dutifully, they published a story the next day accusing the campaign of holding a “tightly-controlled” release, despite the presence of several national media outlets.
Treating the NYtimes as irrelevant warms my heart. Makes me what to vote for McCain.
Michael Novak over at National Review makes some excellent observations about energy usage:
The left’s figures depend on what is meant by “energy.” Before the founding and development of the United States, “energy” meant the human back, beasts of burden, windmills, waterwheels, burning wood, coke, and coal, and the like. The United States is certainly not using 25% of the energy generated by those means today. I don’t think so, although it might be. The darn country is just so efficient.
But if we mean by “energy” only the modern sources of energy – electricity, the Franklin stove, the steam engine, the piston engine propelled by gasoline (and now by electric and/or hydrogen batteries), the processing of crude oil into gasoline, nuclear energy, the jet engine, the development of ethanol and other fuels derived from plants, and other devices – all of these except one were invented by the people of the United States, as their gift to the world. (The exception was the steam engine, invented by our cousins in Britain, and further developed here as well as there.)
In other words, the United States has invented nearly 100% of what the modern world means by “energy.” And it has helped the rest of the world to use 75%.
I’m sure the development of many of those technologies was supported by venture capitalists supplying the resources needed to develop the technology. Those capitalist were smart enough to see those technologies as being useful to people(consumers). These are the same capitalist the left wishes to tax because they believe their wealth resources are more efficiently applied to the state then to technologies that make energy cheap for even the poorest of the poor.
