Category Archives: culture

WoT me worry?

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From the Lebanese (you know, the Lebanon, between the Mediterranean, Syria and Israel), The Daily Star || Rami G. Khouri || Blame those who brought Al-Qaeda to life

Excellent short piece, I agree that the WoT (war on terror) has gone AWOL and the drone wars are nothing but a bloody patch, rapidly passing their use by date. Drones have been shown to be a fundamental game changer along with precision weapons but its still state sanctioned murder (with the unintentional slaughter of innocents reduced but not eliminated) at first and still when used appropriately as part of a strategy with operational planning and support tactics they were/are a success but today they are fireworks pressed up to make like policy.

Our strategic and operational thinking & planning long ago died a dusty death and now the wonks blow things up by the numbers…this is LBJ/McNamara’s #’s game bombing Vietnam all over again.

Don’t get me wrong I doubt we’re killing indiscriminately and our operators are doing the best they possibly can but without the proper and appropriate strategy, planning and tactics, we cannot win, we cannot kill our way out of this. I am concerned that like with antibiotics, misused medicine eventually makes the disease much more dangerous.

Captains Journal || Counterinsurgency Cops … An ugly trend spawned by war-action porn and misplaced priorities

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20130812-091007.jpgOregon Dept. Transportation
Captains Journal || Counterinsurgency Cops (hat tip Instapundit)
This is grim reading, not because the ‘news’ is new but because it puts it in an a societal-political context that says its most likely an accelerating trend. Though perhaps self limiting since the abuses such as Swatting, stupid mistakes, and utterly inappropriate response will eventually cause a backlash, but that could take decades.

Look at the utterly predictable results of the of get tough on crime cycle ( ‘three strikes,’ ‘mandatory minimum sentences,’ ‘federalization ,’ ‘punitive confiscation,’and ‘layering,’) has had; unsustainable prison population, increasing numbers of utterly harmless pseudo criminals behind bars for years, turning rowdy youths into hardened criminals or near non persons, etc.

Now decades of a ‘war on drugs,’ war on this, war on that, failed progressive policies, knee jerk conservative reactions, increasing control of policy by the actors with fingers in the game (public service unions, prosecutors, activists, local politicos, etc) etc, has left us with a crushing burden of law, regulation, tax, and in general government infrastructure…

We saw this happen with the original prohibition, then people were smart and aware enough to realize the ‘cure’ was a feel good bandaid that drove the rot deeper.

This sort of crap: no tolerance, prohibition, cover your ass, take no chances (and that is what this sort of behavior is, in a POLICE force for crying out loud!) degrades the very society it is purporting to support, eroding the penumbra of trust and lawful-ness that our society has depended on to be the most productive and dynamic in the world.

The above is even more worrying when taken in the appropriate context of the surveillance state + anti terrorism infrastructure post 9/11. The original impetus was understandable, the respons well intentioned, sometimes noble, but out of proportion (the American habit of overwhelming firepower) to the original problem which was misdiagnosed, misunderstood, and/or fearfully/willfully overblown. Now we have huge infrastructure in place that is apparently doing nothing…and folks, usually with some level of good intention, want to make use of all that ‘stuff.’

Reason || Performance Enhancing Drugs in athletics, it’s a reflection of society, it’s real ,crime’ is destroying the fans delusions

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Let Them Shoot Up: In Defense of Alex Rodriguez
Alex Rodriguez’s crime isn’t using performance-enhancing drugs—it’s breaking the illusion that Major League Baseball is a fair institution.
Nick Gillespie | August 8, 2013

Agree with this but the bit that bugs me is that we’re forced to pay for these temporal high temples their high priests, acolytes and vestal virgins, when they rake in millions if not billions, then get told not to complain, it’s all good for the economy, great for local pride, a civic resource.

Megan McArdle // Property Forfeiture laws, license to steal?

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Bloomberg// Megan McArdle // How the Lone Star State Legalized Highway Robbery
I think the title’s perhaps Acela corridor biased but the issue is real, very, very, real and localizing it is a dis service, this is a problem all over the US and one of the reasons we should fear the surveillance state.

Your .50 cal rifle not ‘doing it’ for you any longer, what about .905?

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Gun company displays largest-caliber rifle ever created with bullets that cost $40 a piece

  • The .905-caliber rifle fires rounds about 2,100 feet per second
  • The gun also has 2,777 foot-pounds of recoil energy, which essentially makes it as powerful – and gives it about as much ‘kick’ – as firing 10 .30-6 rifles at the same time.
  • The company has only produced three of the uber-powerful rifles

20130803-185212.jpg20130803-185220.jpgRead more at the Daily Mail, UK, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2383113/Gun-company-displays-largest-caliber-rifle-created-bullets-cost-40-piece.html the American gun culture is a continuing horror show for many in the UK, as our home invasion and violent crime rates go down and theirs goes up.

Megan Mcardle | Bloomburg | How Detroit Drowned in a Sea of Troubles

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20130725-202217.jpgDetroit’s downfall…

If you listen to the interwebs, the answer is “terrible, Democratic-run urban politics.” Or “union-busting anti-labor policies” in Southern states that transformed solid middle-class jobs in the Midwest into near-minimum-wage jobs in states such as Alabama and Tennessee. Or maybe “racism.” Or “the urban underclass.”

All of these answers are impossibly reductive. The city of Detroit has no one problem; it has a constellation of them. Here, in no particular order, are some of the most important factors.

  • The fall of geography
  • The decline of the U.S. auto industry
  • The rise of the Sun Belt
  • Industrial monoculture and overbuilding
  • Crime
  • Race
  • Bad government

….
Any political system that has a convenient other to complain about will use that other to excuse the failures of its politicians, and Detroit has been no exception. The city has been plagued by flagrant corruption and plain old bad management. It’s also confronted the same painful math as Rust Belt cities like Buffalo and Rochester: The poor folks in the city want high levels of government services to alleviate their poverty. But if you raise taxes to pay for the services the voters want, the taxpayers will leave.

Megan Mcardle has a way of getting to the knot at the center, this has all been said before but here it is laid out, and as in so many human stories the tragedy was rooted in the heady heydays.

Call it by its true name…which is? Is theft to strong a word?

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20130720-113046.jpgVia Defense News : By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESS : Afghan Customs Fines Hike Cost of US Military Pullout
Graft, grease, protection money, semi regulated theft, robbery via paperwork, levy, duty, tax…
All of these in one view or another…But in that culture it’s just the way it’s done.

Fences MAY improve neighbors but Walls, however ‘great,’ DO NOT

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20130713-174112.jpgThe Atlantic: The Great Wall of Texas: How the U.S. Is Repeating One of History’s Great Blunders
Great little piece, good use of references to Rome, China and Great Britain’s Empire. The title is a bit ExcelaCorridor sneering but that’s the editors fault. I am proud to have been born in Britain and be a Naturalized US citizen. I’m also a wonk-geek-nerd-intellectual-libertarian I think the sealing of the border is fantasy/pandering/bunk, a channel for more neo graft cronyism.

We need immigration reform and border security but in a nation the size of the US, physical barriers are a boondoggle. Reform immigration and border security becomes easier since the vast huge immense majority of folks coming will want to come through the check points and follow the rules. The guys out in the desert, at sea or in the booneys looking to cross without being checked will be much easier to spot.

Too complex an issue you say? Not so say I:

  • 3 types of entry visas, you to apply in person, provide a little information, name, age, place of birth, current residence, phone/cell phone/eMail address, one or two people of some repute who will vouch for you ( if you apply for citizenship up front it’s a bit more complicated, see below.)
  • Visitor: One year, do anything you want, report your location via web when you move, pay taxes, work if you want using your visa # in lieu of SSN. SocialSecurity/WorkersComp ‘fees’ held in accounts with no interest, returned to you as lump sum after you exit and apply for it through US consulate in your country of citizenship. Subject to immediate deportation on conviction of a felony, if you are incarcerated in the US in full you are still subject to deportation. You can convert to a work visa or ask for a citizenship review at any time. If you overstay without upgrading it is an automatic felony and deportation, you are not a citizen though basic constitutional law applies you do not get trial by jury.
  • Work: unlimited stay, once a year report your location in person at any government office state or federal, use your visa number in lieu of a SSN pay all taxes. SS, MC, etc, fees go in a holding account with no interest, convert to regular SS, MC if you retire in the US or if you become citizen, otherwise returned to you as lump sum after you exit and apply for it through US consulate in your country of citizenship. Subject to immediate deportation on conviction of a felony, if you are incarcerated in the US in full you are not subject to deportation. You are not a citizen though basic constitutional law applies you do not get trial by jury regarding deportation. Time on a work visa does not lead to citizenship, you can ask for a citizenship review at any time.
  • Citizenship: you can ask for a citizenship review at any time, when applying for a visa in your country of origin or once in the US. Once approved for a citizenship track visa you are still effectively on a working visa but after seven years you can apply for citizenship and after a second review (same process as the first one) you will be approved for naturalization. The process is fee based and administrative, you will pay a fee for a background check to be carried out by US Immigration not a contractor. A US state or federal judge will be chosen at random in your state of residence, to review your case and approve disapprove. You can apply more than once, after a one year wait, you always pay the fee. If you object to a negative ruling you can pay for a court hearing with another Judge and a lawyer from immigration (two hours of J&L, a one hour hearing and a letter response, Yes/No), you can have a lawyer as well at your own expense, only one review a year. Have to be eighteen to ask for citizenship in your own right. A minor less than 12 becomes a citizen if one or both parents become one and ask for it. A minor over 12 cannot become a citizen until he/she is eighteen but if one or both parents have become naturalized citizens in that interim the child can ask for and immediately receive citizenship as long as they pass the administrative hurdle

So what about large number of illegals in the US, what have you done to discourage illegals:

  1. make it illegal to be in the us without a valid visa#
  2. Most folks come to work and want to be treated fairly, as a legal you have most of the protections of a citizen
  3. Those already in the US will be able to apply for a work visa and will have limited immunity since it is currently not illegal to be in the US without a visa. However you will be required to return to your country of origin ( or if you are a refugee apply for asylum ) before you can apply for citizenship track
  4. require employers to use eVerify for SSN, Visa#, for employees or contractors, make the system extremely simple to use. For example: as an employer or employers agent, you enter your number, it flashes your picture on the screen and the employee taps in his/her number and their picture flashes up, you hit confirm, you are done.
  5. failure to eVerify is subject to stiff fines and public shaming

What about quotas, dumping, the hoards who will flood in, all those aliens? You wail…and let’s get this right this what helps give zombie flicks their grist these days….

  • I would get rid of quotas fo awile and see what happens, but keep the quotas for those coming by boat or plane if you must but simply enforce the visa at the land boarders
  • no this won’t stop all the tramping across the boarder but will make it much less prevalent and industrialized
  • most immigrants come to work and plan on going home, it was more than a decade before my parent’s realized they didn’t want to go back, and it was near run a few times
  • Immigrants (other than a tiny fraction of a sliver) want to make a better life for themselves
  • if they stay it is to make America their home and a better place for their children
  • make it easier to come and go and you will find the flow goes both ways
  • population growth drives economic growth, US natural pop. growth is nearing zero even with lots of youngish immigrant, more would be better for us not worse

I’m not sure why a law implementing the above takes more than five to ten pages, the regulation details will be much longer that’s what bureaucracies are for, but with a simple law comes simple administration. In general a WVisa holder should be treated as a US citizen get rid of layers of special rules make it easy to comply, make it worth complying. But over all – KISS – keep it small and simple…

Wisdom, eloquence and virtue

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Wisdom, eloquence and virtue – these are the aims of a classical education. The patriarchs of western civilization understood that education was more than the acquisition of basic skills and mere competency. The purpose of education was to transform, to elevate, and to refine the mind and the soul. This was the standard, not the exception. At the center of classical education is an emphasis on the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Because these universal values serve as the building blocks of classical learning, the classical arts are timeless and proven, and have been known to produce many eloquent confessors and wise leaders. Our communities today are in dire need of just these sorts of men and women. In an endless pursuit of the latest educational dogma, many schools no longer have the capacity to judge what is Good, True and Beautiful, much less teach it. In forsaking the soul for the mind, they have forgotten how to educate both. Classical Education is a holistic approach to education, and a return to excellence in teaching, curriculum and expectations.

Via: http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/22434-The-Rise-of-Classical-Education.html
From: http://ricochet.com/main-feed/The-Rise-of-Classical-Education
More at: http://www.immanuelalexandria.org/school/curriculum/what-is-classical-education
This triggered a flash of fierce agreement from me, we have debased education and muddled it with training. I think that many intellectuals from the middle twentieth century would say that the communists and their Nazi fellow travelers won. The left (which both Nazi and Communists are at core) managed to stain classical education as elitist and useless, whereas in reality it was at its core vastly more leveling and practical than what we have today. A classical education creates a society of citizens with a deep repository of common referents that are rooted outside our ephemeral now, it also trained the mind to think, to organize to pattern recognize across a range of topics in ways that are broadly useful and common without being straight jacketed.

We also straight jacket everyone into a lockstep industrialized system where homogeneity of outcome is vastly more important than quality and to a degree individuality. Why can’t many kids start near full time work at sixteen and spend some years figuring out what they want to do before continuing at part time or your time schooling. Why is it that high schools are not open to anyone wanting to work on their english or get a high school degree? Why is it so hard to get credit for class work and job experience, hobbies etc, the totality of which would make many overlooked folks true masters of their art?