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Friday, August 05, 2005The Russians have a mini-sub trapped underwater, caught on an underwater antenna.U.S. and British rescue efforts are underway. Here's the story. No word on how the new Russian-Chinese cooperation plays into the matter. Curious they asked the U.S. for help. Ain't it something how the evil imperialists usually accept such requests? 
posted by gbarto at 6:36 PM Thursday, August 04, 2005Here's Stephen Green, writing about joint military exercises between Russia and China. Wonders he, what's up?I suspect that what's up is that China and Russia, whatever they think of each other, are realizing that the talk of America as an isolated superpower was bunk, and that the noose is tightening. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the French and Germans are leery of us, as are quite a few others here and there. But... Europe is now the domain of the US and UK. From World War II forward, anything that happened on the continent only got resolved after the US and UK decided what they wanted to happen and determined to make it happen. That goes for WWII, for the Cold War and for the mess in the Balkans: US-UK cooperation equals imminent solution. Their absence equals stalemate. In Asia, the United States' most venerable ally, of course, is Australia. Japan, however, has been working to make sure everyone knows that they and the US stand together. As Japan and the US get together, Taiwan's future becomes more secure. And the Chinese military-industrial complex's prospect for the ultimate glory becomes more remote. Indonesia, the Philippines and others may not be fond of us, but they know who got rid of Marcos, who cleaned up after the tsunami, etc. The US, Australia and Japan. And now we're cooperating with India. If you look around the world, you see two superpower models right now. The old superpowers are trying to prove their relevance and hang on to their clout. But the US and friends have intensified their drive to do something even zanier: invade countries, establish democracies and leave. Our model has its problems from time to time, including recalcitrant and ungrateful liberated nations. But in our model, once you've given a country democracy, you're almost done and free to move on to the next one. In the old model, you have to maintain your empire. In our new model, it's left to maintain itself. Which means... If you're in Russia, you're watching all your former satellites become democracies separate from and often hostil to the Rodina. If you're in China, you're watching the other old imperial powers become part of a coalition that isn't active in Asia yet but seems awfully fond of giving other countries democracy of the sort the US secured for them. This doesn't just cut off avenues for growth for China and Russia. It literally surrounds them with societies that have rejected their understanding of the world. Which leaves not one but two questions for them: 1) How long before we're totally surrounded? 2) What happens when we're the only ones left to liberate? The bad news for Russia and China is that thirty years ago we though they'd be dividing the world amongst themselves as the West languished. Instead, the West is securing itself by creating allies who even when (à la France and Germany) they won't fight for it, certainly won't fight against it. Gradually, the world is dividing not into Chinese and Russian satellites but into (quasi)democratic, (quasi)Western nations that will fight for shared ideals and (quasi)democratic, (quasi)Western nations that won't. While Russia and China are forced into an alliance as part of a languishing order on the way to extinction. Stephen wonders what it means that Russia and China are cooperating. As he hints here and there in his peace, it means that our alliances with the UK, Australia, Japan and now India are having the intended affect.
posted by gbarto at 4:32 PM Wednesday, August 03, 2005Still at Volokh's (see two posts below). This time the topic is cussing, cuss free zones and why cussing offends.I find the idea of a cuss free zone amusing in that cuss, in the first place, is a mispronunciation of curse. Does this mean they'll ban "darn" and "shoot"? As to the cussing: I have a few coworkers (cow-orkers, as Scott Adams would say) who cannot eschew the use of heartier words starting with F and S. My complaint, offered by one of Volokh's commenters: It's boooooooooooooooooring. And cheap. Vulgarities have their time and place. When that time comes, they should be used. With enthusiasm. Eugene detects reserves of anger that disquiet. Bullsh--! The proliferation of f-bombs is exactly the opposite. It's a substitute for anger and deeply felt emotion. Dropping an f-bomb is the equivalent of putting on blue jeans and turning up the hip-hop. When you do so, you join all the loserboys on streetcorners cussing up a storm to impress the girlies with manhood they haven't earned. From the gangbangers to the jerk in the parking lot, you're looking at a bunch of ninnies ready to explode with anger about having such drab, boring lives that they have to make messes and invent slights for there to be anything in their lives worth being angry over. Keeping it real, my a--! They're pretending it's real. At the local Safeway there's a clean-cut kid who spends his breaks standing at a closed checkout line trading f-bombs with whatever friend dropped by. It's offensive, and were I the manager, I'd teach him to smoke out back, thus removing this unseemly display from the view of the patrons. But since we're playing sociologist, let's look at what's really going on. Here you have a kid who put on his Safeway shirt, tied up his Safeway apron, clocked in on time and who has made enough of a habit of waiting on customers that he's kept his job at least four or five months. Dropping f-bombs? All he needs is a tatoo that says "I'm tuff" to complete the picture. It's another lower-middle-class "real-man" wannabe. The same description could be added of my coworkers, who doubtless view the potential alienation of the clientele as a small price to pay for being sure the other guy knows he's a real he-man, not just another jerk with a job and obligations. Why, though, does the f-bomb offend? Used correctly, it upsets - not necessarily offends - because it's meant to convey upset. Used in everyday conversation among pals, it - like blue jeans and hip-hop - is fine among friends because everyone knows everyone and it's part of the game. There are only two contexts, I suppose, where vulgarity really bothers me. I don't like the person who drops an expletive in relatively innocuous circumstances (bumper tapped in the parking lot, soda dropped on the sidewalk) because he's upset about something else. It really irritates me when I look around and realize it was me. (That's when the TurkeyBlogger gets out the Deepak meditation stuff :) ) The other context, though, were I detest vulgarity, is the one I've described above. The yahoo keeping it real because his real life isn't. And here, I think, the problem isn't anger, fear or anything else of the sort. It's wearing blue jeans to church, now that people don't go to church anymore. It's not a matter of being déclassé or uneducated or incapable of forming more precise speech, per se. It's more a matter of not knowing where you are, not realizing that you are transgressing boundaries as opposed to doing so deliberately and provocatively. An F-bomb irritates, then, not because it's vulgar, transgressive, angry or anything else of the sort. It irritates because of its thoughtlessness and narcissism, the failure of the utterer to realize that an outside world exists that might have better things to do with its time and hearing than take in his efforts to convince he and his friends that he might just be a man. As if.
posted by gbarto at 4:03 PM It would be really useful if this post and the following 11 comments were substituted for the twaddle that appears in most government/civics textbooks to the extent they consider the matter at all. Of course, there's a lot at Volokh that's more useful than anything presented in the "Eggs & Leggs" (Executive, Legislative...) class I had in High School. Forget about teaching ID with evolution. Why aren't we teaching High School students more in government class than who to write if there's a pothole and why they're entitled to have had it fixed last Tuesday? Supplement with Volokh, I say.
posted by gbarto at 3:41 PM Always a planet to me... Volokh has the best post on a possible new planet, even if it is someone else's song.
posted by gbarto at 3:21 PM If you were driving down the freeway when your fender started to come off and one of the kids managed to reach out the window and bang on it till it snapped back into place, we'd all breathe a collective sigh of relief, thank the good Lord there wasn't a terrible and deadly accident and look for a place to pull over and get the car fixed. And the police would ticket you for reckless endangerment and operating an undrivable vehicle. The space shuttle is not an old jalopy, but neither is the analogy entirely inapt. We commend the job the shuttle crew did getting old Betsy humming again. Further, we think this sort of exercise, scary though it is, is useful. President Bush wants us to go to Mars somewhere down the road. When we do, there's going to be a limited supply of spare parts and exactly the sort of ingenuity that characterized recent efforts will be necessary if we want to get there and back in one piece. All the same, it would be a little hard for NASA, at this point, to bluster, "Yeah, we meant to do that, that's it!" The good news is even as the shuttle program winds down, we've got a whole bunch of private investors looking for newer and better ways to get into space. NASA would do well to get behind them, as well as offering any partnerships the new companies would take. This would give them a shot at getting newer technology designed by entrepreneurs and engineers, as opposed to government bureaucrats and politicians whose interest is not in whether the part works but whether its manufacture will provide jobs for the noble state of ... What the shuttle crew has been through in the last few days is a mess. But we have the opportunity to get something worthwhile out of it if the focus is kept away from political agendas and agency pride and placed on the further development of manned space flight. As for those who would point to this or earlier incidents and argue against manned space flight, fooey. Man does not muck about in this stuff to fill reference books, but to expand his world. The excitement of researching Mars, or even distant galaxies, lays not in being able to tally up what we see, à la the businessman in The Little Prince,, but in truly expanding the knowable world.
posted by gbarto at 1:20 PM Steven Vincent, American journalist in Iraq, has been murdered in Basra, along with his translator. Our condolences to friends and families of both. Tigerhawk's obituary is here.
posted by gbarto at 8:51 AM Monday, August 01, 2005Cicero is on a terror, warning that the end is nigh as "civil" officials run roughshod over the common herd for the sake of powerful interests.It really irritates me when he writes posts like these and I can't just dismiss it as rubbish. Case in point: Everywhere in the country, police and prosecutors and federal agencies are using draconian legislation allegedly aimed at and justified by the danger of Muslim terrorism to harass and prosecute people who have not the remotest relationship to any of that.Not sure about this, but after their conduct of the drug war, I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Punishment meted out by agents of the state according to law, formulated to fit the crime? But how gleefully the law-enforcement machine sends child molesters, political undesirables, and any number of others they want to “get” for one reason or another to abuse and death at the hands of the criminal savages who are allowed to control our prisons!Defend your own home and you're a threat to law and order. Rape a tax evader and you're an unacknowledged part of the law enforcement process to encourage people to avoid prison (Bill Lockyer said so). Meanwhile, in the US, the current battle to control the composition of the Supreme Court is dominated by a fierce propaganda war mostly about … abortion.Is there anything more farcical than the lengths to which Dems go to protect the slaughter of fetuses, even in these dangerous times? Yes... the lengths to which the GOP goes to make gestures against it when there's a civilizational crisis they're ostensibly addressing. So everywhere we see the ordinary people being herded about and stampeded and trampled upon in the name of the “War on Terror.”Notice the hubris of our mighty Senators when they're accidentally subjected to the same indignities at the airport that the rest of us are supposed to endure stoically - on the right, because there's a war on, on the left because if grandma didn't have to go through the same thing as Mohammed Akbar of Syria, it would be unfair. When it comes to economics, and to the notion of the war on terror, Marcus and I part company. But when it comes to considering the ease with which our elected officials use each crisis to seize and expand their power over us, indifferent to the effects upon us, but ever wary of upsetting their own applecarts or those of their top backers, well... I'm as paranoid as he is. And as appalled.
posted by gbarto at 10:00 PM When I was teaching college, we used to joke about those poor students whose attendance suffered from the deaths of six grandparents in one semester (do the math). We tried to look the other way, figuring something was up, but we did know better. One would hope that non-profits handling millions of dollars would not only know better, but be inclined to do something about it, given the stakes. And yet we learn this about an Air America fundraiser: ...Ms. Graves said, Gloria Wise made a wire transfer of at least $400,000 to Air America without her knowledge.Our sympathies to Mr. Cohen for such tragedies as he may or may not have suffered, but when's the last time someone handed you $25K for unexpected expenses? Ah, the bleeding hearts at Air America and the Glory Wise Boys & Girls Club. Bleeding wallets, too. Something to think about the next time you're asked to donate to a worthy cause. Which makes this quite a disservice that Air America and its pals have done to the poor and downtrodden for whom they purport to care so much. (source: CQ)
posted by gbarto at 5:36 PM Sunday, July 31, 2005Just to add to the din: Helen Thomas doesn't like the gotcha game... now that someone got her, instead of her getting a pol.Our hearts bleed for her.
posted by gbarto at 11:27 PM Among the greatest sources of strength in a democracy is the provision for the peaceful change of power. We can take pride, for example, that the citizens of the United States were able, after one term, to vote one James Earl Carter from office. Too bad there's no way to vote them out of the office of ex-president. See Stephen Green for why that's a shame.
posted by gbarto at 11:14 PM |
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