HALF-FULL REPORT 08/30/13
As we start Labor Day Weekend, we've had the weirdest week of a weird summer. What's good about it is that it is shining a klieg light on Zero's Anti-Midas Touch - that everything he touches turns to merde. The trigger for this is Zero's playing Hamlet over Syria. There is a cacophony of voices on the Left and the Right screaming at him. Both ultra-leftie Dennis Kucinich and conservative fire-breather Ralph Peters are going apoplectic that he might attack. The New York Times is advising him, on the other hand, to "Bomb Syria, even if it is illegal." The most thoughtful and balanced voice is Newsweek's Ken Pollack, who advises: Go Big or Stay Home. He dispassionately gives the case for, and for not, intervening. His conclusion is Napoleon's: "If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna" - but the odds are high that Zero will do something half-fast, an inconsequential purely face-saving attack that will make the entire situation worse than ever. The Anti-Midas Touch in action. My own view is that Assad and his brother Maher - who ordered the poison gas attack - should be specifically targeted by cruise missiles and killed. I agree with the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens that Zero should target the Assad brothers personally as he did Bin Laden. Yet we can trust Zero not to do the right thing. The good news will be that whatever screw up he does, everyone will be mad at him for it.
HOW DO WE FIX AMERICA?
I must admit that I was prepared to be skeptical when I started reading Mark Levin's The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic. Our country's problem is not the Constitution, it's a government that disobeys it, that uses every method of fascist trickery to distort and get around it. The solution, I thought, is to somehow force the federalies to stop being outlaws - for that's what we have now, an illegitimate outlaw government - and start obeying the Constitution we already have, instead of changing it. America was blessed at its inception with a founding legal structure that has never been surpassed in history up to the present day for enabling the flourishing of its citizenry while preventing tyranny. Its distortion and corruption by all four branches of the federal government - executive, legislative, judicial, and bureaucratic - is what needs to be fixed, not the structure itself. Now, after I read the book, I must admit that Levin is a persuasive guy. Not convincing, but certainly persuasive. Let's talk about where he hits the target, where he misses, and to what extent - if any - does he explain how we fix America.
TIME FOR HAPPINESS
Time is a continuous, objectively measurable forward movement. We measure it with the rising and setting of the sun, the orbit of the earth about the sun, and the tilt of her axis relative to that sun as we make our way about it, giving us the changing seasons. While the mechanics of time in a basic way are well understood, our experience of time and our relationship to time is complex, and can hold the key to our experience of life itself. It turns out that we all have a relationship with time and our life that is very personal, and over which we have a good deal of control, which can change our experience of life and our level of happiness dramatically.
THE FOLLY OF STRIKING SYRIA
You might as well try to teach a snake to juggle as hope the Obama administration will think strategically. The "peace president" is about to embark on his third military adventure, this time in Syria, without having learned the lessons of his botched efforts in Afghanistan and Libya. He hasn't even learned from the Bush administration's mistakes - which he mocked with such delight. Before launching a single cruise missile toward Syria, Team Obama needs to be sure it has a good answer to the question, "What comes next?" If Obama does a Clinton and churns up some sand with do-nothing cruise-missile strikes, it will only encourage the Assad regime. But if our president hits Assad hard and precipitates regime change, then what?
IS CHANGING THE CONSTITUTION THE WAY TO SAVE AMERICA?
The widespread belief is that the American constitutional republic, if not actually broken, is in a state of disrepair. In his new, best-selling book (currently #1 on Amazon), "The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic," Mark R. Levin, president of the Landmark Legal Foundation and nationally syndicated talk-show host, proposes a number of amendments to the Constitution as a fix. Mr. Levin argues that amendments are needed because the nation has entered an age of "post-constitutional soft tyranny" -- as defined by the great 19th-century French historian and philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in "Democracy in America":
"It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people, ‘till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."Has America become what de Tocqueville feared 170 years ago?
THE SAUDIS TRY TO BRIBE AND THREATEN PUTIN OVER SYRIA
Saudi Arabia has secretly offered Russia a sweeping deal to control the global oil market and safeguard Russia's gas contracts, if the Kremlin backs away from the Assad regime in Syria. The revelations come amid high tension in the Middle East, with US, British, and French warship poised for missile strikes in Syria. Iran has threatened to retaliate. The strategic jitters pushed Brent crude prices to a five-month high of $112 a barrel. "We are only one incident away from a serious oil spike. The market is a lot tighter than people think," said Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review. Leaked transcripts of a closed-door meeting between Russia's Vladimir Putin and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan shed an extraordinary light on the hard-nosed Realpolitik of the two sides. Prince Bandar, head of Saudi intelligence, allegedly confronted the Kremlin with a mix of inducements and threats in a bid to break the deadlock over Syria. Here they are.
OUR INTELLIGENCE BILLIONS ARE SPENT TO FAIL
Despite having, by far, the world's largest and most lavishly funded "intelligence community," we suffered a massive intelligence failure on 9/11/2001, and repeated embarrassment since. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon "could have and should have been prevented," Admiral Michael McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, told Congress in 2007. We failed to stop tBoston Marathon bombers in April of this year (even though the Russians had warned us they were dangerous.) Our intel community was surprised by the "Arab Spring," the subsequent Arab winter, and the attack on our consulate in Benghazi on 9/11/2012. How come? In large part because we have the world's largest and most lavishly funded intelligence community, I think. Before we go there, let's review what it takes to prevent nasty surprises.
HALF-FULL REPORT 08/23/13
Is everybody blind?" "What in the world has happened to us?" Two bulls-eye questions asked by ordinary Americans that we all should be asking each other. The first was asked by Marine Colonel Peter Martino last week (8/12) in a Concord NH city council hearing regarding its police department's proposed acquisition (with Homeland Security money) of a "counter attack vehicle" to protect Concord from "domestic terrorist threats" such as the liberty advocates of the Free State Project. Thanks to Col. Martino, and the video of his testimony's going viral, people may start catching on that their local police department is being converted into Obama's Storm Troopers, militarily armed to crush any attempt to rebel against his 1984 fascism. The highest priority of conservatives on a local basis should be to demand the defunding of their community's police militarization. Almost every city above 25,000 population in America has its own militarized SWAT Team. Does yours? Regarding the second question, since you're not a hermit in a Himalayan cave, you watch Duck Dynasty that keeps setting records for the most-watched show on cable-tv. The show has become a cultural phenomenon as the Robertson family is hilariously but clean-decent funny, pro-family, pro-life, unapologetically Christian, self-made wealthy and unapologetically capitalist, and loves guns and hunting. The show is incredibly popular and is the antithesis of all liberal values. This was made sparkling clear with a video of a speech given by Phil Robertson, the family patriarch, that has gone wildly viral this week. This quote is why:
MARSHMALLOWS, GREEN TEA, AND SUCCESS IN LIFE
It began in Trinidad. Walter Mischel, a Jewish kid from Vienna whose family escaped from the Nazis to Brooklyn, was doing field work on the Caribbean island for his Ph.D. in psychology. It was 1955, and he noticed the population was split between people whose families came from India and those from Africa. The Indians thought the Africans were "impulsive hedonists" who lived for the moment and never cared for the future, while the Africans thought the Indians only cared about "stuffing money into their mattresses" and didn't know how to have fun. He wondered what lay behind such assessments. At age 28, Walter became an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard. That was in 1958, but a year later, Timothy Leary joined the faculty, and Walter couldn't handle all of his students freaked out on the psychedelics Leary was preaching the use of. So he went to Stanford. In 1966, when the Stanford Psych Department launched its Bing Nursery School to research child development, Walter thought back to his days in Trinidad and came up with an experiment that was to become famous as the Stanford Marshmallow Test. The implications for America today are astounding.
THE DEMISE OF AND ANSWER TO SKYPE
Skype began as a very cool service. I used it and recommended it - a lot. Skype (originally Sky peer-to-peer) was a peer to peer voice system, which means that there was no central computer controlling everything. It was also encrypted, though the internal details were never revealed. But, as will a lot of good tech ideas, the developers were persuaded to sell it. In this case, to eBay in 2005. (For $2.5 billion, which is a lot of persuasion!) Then, after doing very little with the tech for several years, eBay sold it to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011. That's when the serious trouble began. Here are the highlights: