Why I am not a fan of 'rightroots'

This article is spurred on by reading a number of authors on the concept of a 'rightroots' to be an equivalent of the Leftist version of the same.  Articles of interest are by Patrick Ruffini and Rick Moran.  I will not take the 'remaking' or 'rebuilding' concept: what has been in the past represented the Nation as it was then, and cannot be 'rebuilt'.  I will take my own tack on this which means that this is not an examination of POLITICS but of CULTURE that creates politics.  It is that difference that must be faced from here on out as the technology, culture and ability to understand how they play out will help to determine what the best response is to the changes that face us.

One of the prime factors in the changing face of politics is the high level of connectedness the modern media offers.  And yet there are prime patterns that can be seen in how individuals cluster to certain basic types of outlook based on their personality, culture, and ideology.  As this is, by and large, not a dichotomous domain, that is not having 'one side or the other' but one of main types with overlapping between them, it is necessary to examine those types and posit what they mean in modern political thought.  I go over the three basic types of associational views in this post: The more things change, the more things become The Village.  And as that is a twist-title, using a term that appears to have one meaning while, in fact, saying something else,I will outline the three main types of interactivity seen on the Internet.  Do note these are not the be-all, end-all of descriptions, but a 'rough and ready' set of guidelines to identify individual interactions when taken in larger clusters.

First is Marshal MacLuhan's 'global village'.  This is the Leftist consideration as Sen. Hillary Clinton used in her less than famous book about things taking a village.  What MacLuhan was getting at, however, is the tribal type of association at small scale interaction finding a lowest common denominator of agreeable concepts within a given, large group.  The worry is that in becoming a 'global village', humanity would revert back to more primitive forms of interaction and ideas, and actually lose some higher orders of reasoning as societal associations in modern interactive media come to the forefront.  On the Internet this is reflected by such things as MySpace, Friendster, hi5, and any other 'social portal' that shifts humanity's interactions to a small set of rationales for interacting.  Early Christianity survived the collapse of the Roman Empire through just such a societal sub-grouping, so that as larger society collapsed this sub-group that had a different organizational outlook and ethos was able to maintain continuity and slowly replace the older Imperial society.  The overall thrust is that this will see the return of things like 'clans' and small scale common agreement communities that are not geographically co-located.  Thus Sen. Clinton invokes the African village as a touchstone, but then changes how to do it to the next major form of network.

Second is Patrick McGoohan's 'The Village'.  This place was demonstrated in the visual media of television and placed at the time of its filming in the 1960's, but evoked a different form of individual interaction moderated and, indeed, controlled by an outlook that placed the needs of any individual below the needs of society, security and social welfare.  To accomplish this an authoritarian control structure is used.  While old fashioned villages were made up of multiple clans and kinsmen, plus other assorted groups with filial connection networks, the first of the villages that gained outside administration by the first Empires experienced a shift away from local societal support to a support based on outside ideals that were impressed upon the population.  This form of control system became the basis for States and Nations, and is a centralizing force in human relationships.  Only at the outside, ruling levels, do such things as associational networks supply any input into ideology, and those limited views are then impressed upon a broader society.  When Sen. Clinton calls for everyone to just take care of everyone else and call the State organs if something is going wrong, that is NOT an African village but a top-down control structure requiring a high degree of personal espionage to support it.  And that espionage is *willing* as the rewards for showing social wrong are high, the risks to mis-reporting minimal... unless you are the one being mis-reported, then your life is made a living hell.  McGoohan's view of how a relatively high tech society would do this was pretty plain: espionage (across the full spectrum of life, from mere mechanical espionage to willing spies), 'nice' enforcement of the laws (where things are done to you 'for your own good') and a depersonalization of individuals within society (everyone is known by their number, all numbers are equal, but some numbers are more equal than others).  It must be noted that 'control' need not be a directly stated or performed concept, as it can become an agreed-upon, unstated ethos that everyone abides by and then individuals root out others who do not conform to this.  On the Internet this can be seen at such sites as dKos, DU, DD and a number of other sites that place conformance of ideology above personal liberty and freedom.  John Fonte describes this as Transnational Progressivism, examines how it is at odds with Liberal Democracy, and, that like Socialism before it, there is a Transnational Right that forms up another 'wing' of Transnationalism.  These concepts of ruling are ones that see group affiliation and placement of individuals at birth as primary and, indeed, the only necessary determinants on what one is allowed to do in society.  These are inherently anti-liberal forms of thought that depend on such things as racial and ethnic identity as prime movers for governing and that rights are apportioned out by an Elite class that oversees who is superior to others and determines the various pecking orders within society.

The third form is not a central structure based concept, but one that arose in the wake of other, previous, central control concepts wiping out a good part of Europe by enforcing religious and cultural divisions as guided by an Elite ruling class and not taking local control domains into consideration.  What would come out of that is the recognition that liberty and rights are NOT attached to race, religion or ethnic background but held by individuals.  That is old-fashioned Liberalism that depends on human liberty and the rights of individuals to guide society with minimal oversight by government.  This encompasses many previous ideas of States and Nations, thus utilizing Westphalian concepts of religious tolerance to allow individuals their own space and cognizance to worship as they please.  That would be broadened from the original three religious orders (Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism) and be incorporated into a larger conceptual space of what individuals were to do as part of society and what society could and could not do to the individual based on those areas of belief.  Older forms of this also arrived by Nations that had a high degree of village structure with local democratic means and those forms of local democracy carried up to the highest levels of rulership so, as one Scandinavian monarch has said 'The King is not above the Law'.  Fused together this concept of Common Law and Religious Tolerance would spawn Individualism supported by Liberty: liberalism.  Modern day 'liberals' have moved to the McGoohan form thought and drifted away from the purity of Rights of Man as an Individual conceptions of it.  Under Individualism a good culture arises out of good activities of individuals, those are reflected in common laws that do not discriminate in purely personal venues, but apply Just means to punish individuals for acts that wantonly kill members of society, that go outside common practices of accountability and turn criminal, and that corrode and debase the common agreement to live together in 'more perfect Unity' while abiding that culture cannot and should not be pressed down from government but built up by individuals.  In the Internet this is the form of free-floating self-identification with small clusters around similar themes like FreeRepublic (although it also has tended towards authoritarian venues, but still tries to adhere to the established ethos), and other things such as 'list links', 'web rings' and blogging communities.

 

As noted none of these areas are purely mutually exclusive due to the way the Internet is set up as a flat point to point protocol structure.  That flat structure allows these larger systems to be built on it, but does not mandate any actual form of any structure, save that it adhere to the common means of intercommunication by TCP/IP.  If society depends upon the environment, then the flat structure IS the environment for enabling these social group types to exist in the form they are in.

There are defects to these basic outlooks: MacLuhan did not foresee the 'democratizing' of the microchip and the ability to make video yet another way of common communication amongst individuals, McGoohan did not posit an environment that was uncontrolled although that it would become controlled by the ruling status group, and Liberalism did not encompass that the extreme expression of it in France would lead to overall social decay and disorder when all ruling forms of government were discredited and thus garner a huge civil death toll as the rule of the mob was put in place, not democratic means.

Politically these are interacting realms, although the ability of modern Leftists to garner a galvanizing force via social association sites has not gone over well: there is no uprising in MySpace, say, to make it a new haven of Leftist attitudes, nor is there a mass movement in Friendster to start eliminating those that have political views that do not accord to some elitist view of the world.  That is not for lack of trying, but it is for lack of understanding that the older, elitist view of society that is being espoused has a non-identicality with what individuals see in their daily lives.  What can flourish in the hot house cultures of academia, MSM and 'activist' groups does NOT well fit the overall condition of society nor the world.  If anything the people in such social spaces organize into self-identified groups that cross all previous lines of geography, society and culture.  Enforced 'openness' and 'anti-discrimination' turns into closed cliques that are highly discriminatory, and no one can force you to join one.  By setting up a standard that makes no sense for individuals to flock to it, the people who do come to those things are ones already aligned to them: there is no great message to hand out and gain further adherents.  MacLuhan trumps McGoohan via the use of individual liberty and freedom to associate by and large.  Even worse is that if a ruling ethos does come to take over such a site, then its members just may flock *elsewhere* and form a *new* social based organizing structure that is immune to how the first one is taken over by a common agreement system amongst all users.  That is part of why we have so many different social group portals and sites: folks get fed up with the administrative rules of one and move to another, and the gaming community is more than willing to do that with its extended clan system so that members can retain their clan status even when moving from one site to another.

The Totalitarian response to this use of personal liberty to create culture is to attempt a take-over of government which would have the means of communication under its purview.  Every Totalitarian State does this, as it ensures that only the 'approved' messages get out:  USSR, People's Republic of China, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, Syria, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  These are all Nations that are trying hard, past and present, to filter what people in their societies see, what they hear and, ultimately, what they think.  The USSR and its immediate satellite States collapsed due to the inherent stagnation and inefficiencies that go with this credo of rulership, China has tried 'liberalizing' while still maintaining an iron fist and has found that even such areas as talking about sexual activity soon starts to be used to hit the ruling elite structure.  Even worse for the Totalitarian outlook is that the ubiquity of computing and flat communication infrastructure becomes nearly impossible to prevent communications from going through obstacles.  Like the Great Wall, the Great Firewall of China has areas it can't cover, pre-existing tunnels under it and is incapable of controlling the vast array of cheap, modern communications devices that allow for the fast promulgation of information across disparate networks of computers, cell phones, pagers, PDAs, personal music devices, and so on.  Still, if the ruling elite had control of the majority of comms worldwide, a general stifling of thought could take place, and utilizing 'softer' forms of social recrimination like 'Politically Correct' speech codes is a start in getting individuals used to elite mandates on what is and is not acceptable in the realm of speech and thought according to that elite group.

That leaves us with the modern political Right that still looks to the ideals of Individualism and the Rights of Man as an Individual, able to practice liberty with freedom and create a better society in doing so.  Normally this has been called 'Conservatism' but now finds disparate groups that no longer fit under the 20th century 'Conservative' and 'Liberal' dichotomy coexisting in the same thought space:  traditional Conservatives supporting that limited government leads to the greatest liberty to create one's own way in life and contribute to society, and the Jacksonian concept that society is a necessary part of culture but that society cannot and should not seek the means of government to dictate social form to the people.  One of the great lessons of Christianity that is not a biblical teaching, is that its community based view held that individual self-restraint was important in life, even as the pagan societies collapsed into debauchery.  In an era when so many want to hand excessive amounts of freedom to government to dictate social forms to society, it is those who want as little government as possible and massive self-restraint of those running for office that now form a coherent voting concern on the Right.  That is no longer the old 'Conservative' venue of Religious, Fiscal and Security: it is one of Society that is supported by individuals holding Government down to the few things it *must* do to protect our society and make sure it does them *well* and doesn't try to do one thing more than those few things.

When we hear the bemoaning that there is no Conservative echo chamber like dKos, DU or DD, most Conservatives smile and say: 'Damned right, we don't need no stinking misguided group-think to tell ME what to do'.   That really does hurt some of the old Conservative Coalition - those who see interpersonal relationships as one between themselves and their Creator and the separate social contract as two separate areas cannot come to common agreement under the old Conservative banner.  The older banner of individualism and personal liberty puts forward that if you are so worried about the sanctity of marriage, then demonstrate that by leading a good and upstanding married life and being a scion of your community by doing so.

So what can be done to counter the tribalist and totalitarian trends of these societies, often while addressing their concerns but demonstrating that liberty and freedom are answers, not solutions, to the ills of mankind?

 

First and foremost the two party structure has demonstrated that it is ill suited to represent diverse peoples.  The attempts to explain why parties that can 'co-opt' plans are necessary to prevent fragmentation of politics has been put forward as a 'good thing'.  A 'solid party line' to keep 'the other party in check' posits that these two parties are mutually exclusive, and yet we have seen that they trend towards commonality due to the fact that those elected forevermore by being Incumbents see much more affinity for EACH OTHER than they do with the general populace.  This is not a new problem, but the best summation was done from the Anti-Federalist view (and that is a poor proposition for the types of criticisms of the Constitution as not all were 'anti-federalist' in nature) by Brutus in Brutus No. 4 on 29 NOV 1787:

In order for the people safely to repose themselves on their rulers, they should not only be of their own choice. But it is requisite they should be acquainted with their abilities to manage the public concerns with wisdom. They should be satisfied that those who represent them are men of integrity, who will pursue the good of the community with fidelity; and will not be turned aside from their duty by private interest, or corrupted by undue influence; and that they will have such a zeal for the good of those whom they represent, as to excite them to be diligent in their service; but it is impossible the people of the United States should have sufficient knowledge of their representatives, when the numbers are so few, to acquire any rational satisfaction on either of these points. The people of this state will have very little acquaintance with those who may be chosen to represent them; a great part of them will, probably, not know the characters of their own members, much less that of a majority of those who will compose the foederal assembly; they will consist of men, whose names they have never heard, and whose talents and regard for the public good, they are total strangers to; and they will have no persons so immediately of their choice so near them, of their neighbours and of their own rank in life, that they can feel themselves secure in trusting their interests in their hands. The representatives of the people cannot, as they now do, after they have passed laws, mix with the people, and explain to them the motives which induced the adoption of any measure, point out its utility, and remove objections or silence unreasonable clamours against it. — The number will be so small that but a very few of the most sensible and respectable yeomanry of the country can ever have any knowledge of them: being so far removed from the people, their station will be elevated and important, and they will be considered as ambitious and designing. They will not be viewed by the people as part of themselves, but as a body distinct from them, and having separate interests to pursue; the consequence will be, that a perpetual jealousy will exist in the minds of the people against them; their conduct will be narrowly watched; their measures scrutinized; and their laws opposed, evaded, or reluctantly obeyed. This is natural, and exactly corresponds with the conduct of individuals towards those in whose hands they intrust important concerns. If the person confided in, be a neighbour with whom his employer is intimately acquainted, whose talents, he knows, are sufficient to manage the business with which he is charged, his honesty and fidelity unsuspected, and his friendship and zeal for the service of this principal unquestionable, he will commit his affairs into his hands with unreserved confidence, and feel himself secure; all the transactions of the agent will meet with the most favorable construction, and the measures he takes will give satisfaction. But, if the person employed be a stranger, whom he has never seen, and whose character for ability or fidelity he cannot fully learn — If he is constrained to choose him, because it was not in his power to procure one more agreeable to his wishes, he will trust him with caution, and be suspicious of all his conduct.

This is not a criticism of 'politics' but a recognition of culture that drives politics.  We no longer have any knowledge on a personal basis of our Representatives, and they are distant from We the People.  This has been CAUSED by two parties that have REMOVED the ability of new and minority parties from THREATENING THEM. 

That is an act of AUTHORITARIANISM.

The two parties are top-down structures that have permanent 'organs' in them that become the spots where ideology is vested in the hands of very few people.  Isn't THAT an asinine thing to do in a representative democracy?  Who ELECTED THEM?  Did their party members take a VOTE on them?  Or have these individuals been selected by a less than diverse group of individuals who have been installed via other means (representative or not)?  If it is secondary selection, then where is the representative democracy in that?  Is there an ability to vote these people out if you don't like them?

Going on that theme for just a bit more: if you DO have elections for local party offices, do more than half the registered party members actually VOTE for these people?  Not half the votes, but half the actual people... who shows up to vote or if it is by mail, how many return ballots?  This is vital because if a party office or branch that is local cannot get 50% interest in what it is doing, then just what the hell good is it?  And if you point to 'national politics', perhaps a page from Tip O'Neill can be understood about 'all politics being local'?  If you can't get local input and people just call themselves by your party as a general affiliation,   then that tells me a whole lot more about the 'party' than anything it stands for:  people generally don't BELIEVE IN IT enough to TAKE PART in it.

This gets to be a larger consideration based on the sheer number of people who just no longer vote.  This is a HUGE problem for a representative democracy as the result of going under 50% turnout is a majority of a plurality or this thing known as a MINORITY.  That is what representative democracy is supposed to AVOID.

From this first area there are some things that need to be examined.

1)  Political Parties - Believe it or not, political parties are NOT supposed to be a great fundraising machine.  They have become that due to the escalation of prices and concentration of power to two parties - the market is CLOSED and, therefore, the price of the market goes UP for politics.  If there were more people running for office from the local level on up, the cost per individual would go DOWN as the money gets more widely distributed over multiple individuals and parties.  Parties were meant to represent a common set of values and ideologies amongst its members and not be something that would gain lots of money because of that.  As you remove the number of parties, the amount of money per party goes up and the participation falls at the party can no longer represent a coherent set of ideologies.  The answer to problems in representative democracy is: more representative democracy up and down the entire scale of politics.

2)  Local Membership - If you can't get half of those registered in a district to vote for party offices, then just how can it be said that those elected from that district represent the will of the majority of members in that district?  That is a lie.  Saying that only those 'interested' vote is an excuse for poor performance and lack of credible party ideology and people who support them.  How do you know this?  Lack of members voting.  Beats me what would happen if a party decided that it was actually going to act like one in which representative democracy were an important concept to keeping the party running.  The two current parties would probably lose a large number of districts if they did so, with some districts losing both.  Believe it or not, that is not a *bad thing* as it then identifies where the party can, should and MUST work on outreach and understanding the diversity of its membership.  The US has a diverse culture and needing to find a cultural basis for political thought means that any party undertaking such must at least be able to explain what culture it is representing and then see what other nearby cultures are willing to have this explained to them.  Perhaps to even gain some acceptance and build a better cross-cultural understanding that works on common concepts and projects.

3)  Party Leaders - Elected via representative democratic means or not?  If no, then why not?  If yes, what happens if less than half the membership actually turns out to elect them?  Might I suggest slashing the roles of those who didn't bother to vote, and turning them into 'Independents'?  That would get you a core set of interested people who are willing to participate, who are willing to think about the issues and who have a common value of representative democracy as one of their cultural beliefs.  And perhaps, just perhaps, this should not be run by politicians who have a vested interest and concern with their political brethren... if 'experience' is such a good thing, just why is it turning people off so much these days?  This is a symptom of a decaying political culture in which those elected, by the act of getting elected, think they know what is best for everyone else.  What that does is begin to marginalize other ideas that may not lead to electability,but are representative in the wider culture.  Do you want to turn people OFF via how you run your party and how you address your members?  That is what is happening now, and it isn't working out so well.

4)  Stating your culture and the politics that derives from it -  Guess what?  Spouting Socrates in a political vacuum is an act of elitism.  Explaining Socratic dialogue as a methodology and working with others is addressing them as individuals and not playing an elitist trump card.  So many say they adore President Lincoln, so few look at what he did and the ideas that he enacted, not in his writings but in the simple laws and rules that passed under his pen.  The Emancipation Proclamation is wonderful!  So why has no one bothered to study the Field Manual 100 that the US Armed Forces had given to them under Lincoln's signature?  Is how he thought war should be fought by a civilized people unimportant?  Can you actually say you KNOW what the ideals and laws of war were at the time of the Civil War?  No?  Why not?  President Lincoln was a civilized man and ensured the US adhered to civilized values in the realm of warfare, so why NOT look at those as JUST as important as the Emancipation Proclamation?    You can and will learn how terrorism was described in his era and called something else and what the rules were for dealing with it by the Armed Forces.  But that is actually taking a look at what he signed into LAW and NOT cherry picking things you do like or things that are easy to understand but seeing the complexity of the civilization as HE SAW IT and AFFIRMED IT.  If you like what he did with slavery, then you might just respect what he did about terrorism when practiced in the battlefield.  Either way it will cause you to re-evaluate the man, the Nation and our people, and come to a deeper understanding of why good culture makes good laws.

 

One point, four conclusions.  Nasty, huh?

 

Second is putting the representation back into representative democracy.  People hate change.  Yet we are a growing nation both in population and economy, and one of the most powerful because we have a system that gives such great leeway to the common man to flex his or her liberty using freedoms to empower them to do good for themselves, their families and their society.  Yet, we are stuck with a Congress sized in 1911.  Federal Farmer No.3 of 10 OCT 1787 puts the idea like this:

Should the general government think it politic, as some administrations (if not all) probably will, to look for a support in a system of influence, the government will take every occasion to multiply laws, and officers to execute them, considering these as so many necessary props for its own support. Should this system of policy be adopted, taxes more productive than the impost duties will, probably, be wanted to support the government, and to discharge foreign demands, without leaving any thing for the domestic creditors. The internal sources of taxation then must be called into operation, and internal tax laws and federal assessors and collectors spread over this immense country. All these circumstances considered, is it wise, prudent, or safe, to vest the powers of laying and collecting internal taxes in the general government, while imperfectly organized and inadequate; and to trust to amending it hereafter, and making it adequate to this purpose? It is not only unsafe but absurd to lodge power in a government before it is fitted to receive it? It is confessed that this power and representation ought to go together. Why give the power first? Why give the power to the few, who, when possessed of it, may have address enough to prevent the increase of representation? Why not keep the power, and, when necessary, amend the constitution, and add to its other parts this power, and a proper increase of representation at the same time? Then men who may want the power will be under strong inducements to let in the people, by their representatives, into the government, to hold their due proportion of this power. If a proper representation be impracticable, then we shall see this power resting in the states, where it at present ought to be, and not inconsiderately given up.

Yes, Congress could change its representational proportion in the House via law, no need to go back to the people and ask for this via an amendment.  If you actually do believe in representative democracy, then the proportion ought to be such so that you actually have some slim chance of knowing your Representative.  At the current 1:500,000 that is an impossibility, unless you are one of the select few.  As I point out in the article above, if you take all the staff House members are allowed and add it to the House members you wind up with a number almost *exactly* equal to the maximum number of representatives allowed via proportion in the Constitution.  The question is always raised: how could that ever be organized?  Isn't it too unwieldy?

Answer?  How the hell do you organize all those Congresscritters and their staff as it IS?

If you can do THAT then you damned well have a good handle on organizing a House that size.  Would it be difficult?  Yes.  Impossible?  Ever seen the size of some of the companies on this planet operating on a global basis with a distributed workforce?  If you have then you have your answer that it will be far, far, far less difficult standing up something under the size of, say, Boeing spread across a handful of time zones.  Hell, there are some software projects that have gone into this territory, so the idea that a Congress this size given modern telecom and automated systems *can't* be run is idiotic.  It might take a few sessions to transition to it, yes, but at the end of that time you then have a flexible enough system to handle the workload *and* create transparency for ALL public bills.  Each and every single bill and amendment would be electronic, searchable and public, with only the 'Black Budget' kept on a secure set of systems.

What would a large 'Maximum House' do?

1) The addition of such a large number of individuals would cut the per person cost of running for office, by at least one full order of magnitude (ie. it would be 10% of the current cost per seat per person) and possibly more as each person would be doing 1:30,000.

2) This gets direct citizen input in a way that the current system does not.  Actual citizens who want to spend two years in office actually *could* achieve that.  Any way to increase actual citizen participation in the governing process *helps* representative democracy and does not *hurt* it.

3)  Pork - 'Many eyes find bad code'.  A paraphrasing of the open source software movement, but can you imagine trying to get thousands of other members to agree to *your* pet project?  All it takes is five or six to 'blow the whistle' and you are toast as you are now answerable NOT to 500,000 people who only vaguely associate with a party, but with 30,000 who are your NEIGHBORS.  Your chances of actually packing pork in for your friends?  Effectively zero.

4)  Governmental oversight.  You now have enough Congress critters to cover every agency, every directorate of every agency and possibly every department of every agency.  That is *oversight* were department heads need to explain their jobs to members of Congress... and then those Congresscritters get to decide just what the necessary functions of those agencies *are*.  You want to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in government?  Get a weekly or monthly visit from your Congressman for a few days as he or she tries to figure out if you are spending the people's money well.  My guess is that enough Congresscritters will raise enough stink that a lot of government will get a chop.

5)  The tax code.  Take the tax code.  Divide the pages by 10,000.  Hand out those pages to members of Congress to redline.  Collect all redlines on a common document.  See what is left.  If you want an understandable tax code, it will have to be something that *can* be read easily by a rather large group of people that better represent the cross-section of the American population.  You can probably do this three times in a month then see the entire set of collective redlines and any two out of three then wipes that part of the code.  Many eyes will make clean code.

6)  Zero staff.  Come on, you have a proven amount of people to handle the work load.  Congressman is no longer a sinecure but a *job*: 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.  Making Congressman into a *job* and not a political stepping stone is one of the most beneficial things that could ever be done to it.  Plus it is an all-volunteer workforce!  No one forces you to be a Representative... lots of highly motivated people there.

7)  Regulations.  See the tax code idea?  Duplicate it on the Federal Regulations.  This will become tiresome to point out, but the massive amount of government intrusion now needs a massive attack to pull it apart.  You can't do that with an elected elite from a two party system that has a vested interest in not 'rocking the boat'.  That is what the Senate is for, though heaven help them in trying to sneak anything past a House that size.

8)  Removing power from individual House member's hands and distributing it *widely* is a very, very good thing.  Concentrated power is a bane of a representative democracy.  Why so many *support* something that is toxic to representative democracy is beyond me.

9)  There are many problems in this, of course.  As the House can actually determine what the House *is*, it can make that individual rooms in Congresscritter's homes while they are in office.  That might take a bit to stand up, but well worth it once done as it gets the power out of Washington, which then becomes a procedural area for House transactions.  Otherwise the House will need new digs: maybe an old sporting arena or closed military base... lots of those around these days.  Maybe work everything out electronically, first, and then fly in for a week of voting.  The mechanical problems do not outweigh the benefits to the republic of actually having a tax code, federal regulatory code, and set of laws that is actually understandable to the majority of such a large body of people.  That is what representative democracy is supposed to do: keep government understandable and out of the hands of the elite.  If you believe *that* then you *must* want a larger and more representative House.  Again, this is CULTURE defining POLITICS, not the other way around.

 

If conservative politics derives from a conservative culture, then just what is the culture that is being addressed?  What does it support and does it recognize that good ideas for government need common assent for it to be enacted while disenfranchising none?  There are some very strong conservative ideals that the current political atmosphere never addresses.  I've hit on a couple so let me highlight them.

- Showing up for work and treating your job seriously.  That does not happen in current politics at the National level.  A Congress with a 3 day work week and months of vacation time point to there being little to NO work ethic in Congress.  The day I hear of this added to a 'conservative agenda' is the day I just might take it seriously.  Until then: no dice.

- Applying the same standard of ethics to all candidates.  That means not taking bribes, not chiseling on your taxes, not giving kickbacks to your friends, not seeking special treatment from the law, not paying under the table for work, not doing an 'I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine' to explain why you can't stick with your beliefs and actually stating your beliefs that you hold dear to you that are NOT political but tell WHY you get good political guidance from them.  If you sign on to such a code of ethics BEFORE you run for any damned office, and you BREAK them while in office, then you can expect a backlash from your supporters.  I don't need a 'party platform' if those running for office are people I can get to know, are willing to state their beliefs and why those beliefs help them to come to good decisions.  Until then: no dice.

- Morals.  Here's the deal with me, I don't know about you, spout off all you like about morals.  If you cover what you say under your ethics and you break THOSE then I have a problem.  You wanna cheat on your wife, mistress and ex-girlfriend?  Damn are you in for a world of hurt, lotsa luck on that.  Drive you from office?  WHY?  Did you put down you consider fidelity to your wife/mistress/ex-girlfriend to be important to you as an ethical matter?  It might bring up some questions of your judgment, yes, but it is your PERSONAL LIFE TO RUIN so long as you don't do it on GOVERNMENT TIME.  The only office where that might matter is that of President as that is also Chief Law Enforcement Officer.  Even there minor things I don't have a problem with... keep it personal, fess up and be up front about it so we can all have a fun time knowing that the President sleeps on the sofa.  I didn't have problems with Clinton's acts, but his perjury I had problems with.  The racy, juicy sex stuff was 'entertainment' from the Oval Office: cheap and sleazy!

-  Accountability at work.  All of us working stiffs are (or were if retired) quite good on this concept.  Politicians, not so much.  Being a Congresscritter is a *job* not a chance for self-fulfillment and self-enrichment.  If you are a slacker, expect your constituents to figure that out very quickly.  At 500,000 a handful of votes, say 10 or 12, probably isn't a deal breaker.  At 30,000?  Yes, then you actually do have to start thinking, especially if you have a district with a relatively stolid group of folks there.  Even at a higher turnover (which allows for demographic shifts to show up very quickly in the House) that small number begins to look very important based on what the expected turnout is every 2 years.  And the fewer people that turn out, the more important that small handful is, so depressing turnout works *against* slackers.  Unless your district is basically a slacker district, though outside of Hollywood, I can't think of many of those.  Until accountability is made a touchstone of some group trying to gain political traction, they can take a hike.

-  Do you notice that I haven't said a single, solitary word on religion?  I consider that to be a deeply personal thing.  Religion can give a very good basis for navigating what is and is not so good for law making.  It is not alone, however, as even in relatively homogeneous districts, there will be diversity of religion and religious insight.  Good laws and the rationale behind them *must* go beyond the religious venue and actually explain why these things are good to the wider community and the Nation in terms that can be religious but must also include multiple religions and our common heritage in the Common Law.  Here good law is derived from religion and religious culture as part of the larger culture and is a vital part of helping people to draft better laws for the Nation.  If those who founded our Nation were wise enough to take a look at the laws of the Ancients who were not Christian or Jew, and derive wisdom and a benefit from society from them, then it is impossible to define that only one religion has all wisdom in it.  It is because we build and refine good laws that we find ourselves assured of good use of the law.  It does not matter if it comes from Moses, Christ, Suleiman, Alexander or Thorgny.  And as we come from the Common Law of England and are under the Peace of Westphalia those, too, must be taken into account.

-  Liberty is the ability to apply your gains in life with your freedoms to make a better life for yourself, your family and your society.  Without liberty we are nothing as a Nation.  Mandate that liberty can only be used in a way dictated by government, and you have purified evil, not good.  We invest negative liberties in government so that we may keep watch over them, restrain them and ensure that they do not get into the wrong hands to harm us.  We retain positive liberty for ourselves as we know what to do with them far better than any government ever CAN or WILL.  The best we can do is find the common wisdom amongst ourselves to use the few things we give government to do so as to do them well and accountably so that they DON'T harm us.  From this the idea of limited government that does few things well is derived: so that the citizenry has the greatest amount of liberty possible to do good.

 

The problem with the two party system is that neither party represents that basic set of conservative values in which we understand that we must have a common society and still must give the greatest leeway to our fellow man.  A 'live and let live' society.  It is not a 'litmus test of issues' as those are derivative of politics, not culture.  If we address questions through that distorted prism OF politics and attempt to apply that TO society, then the Republic will and, indeed, must fail:  government has no business dictating culture to society, only limiting the abuses of individuals.  Whenever I hear about a 'new right' I tend to see folks with a grand set of check-off boxes that you *must have checked* to be a conservative.  Those check off boxes are not ones that are open to the diverse culture of America but are attempts to limit that self-same culture via government.

I have a problem with that.

That is what the LEFT is doing, and I find it detestable on both 'sides'.

And neither side is willing to field some folks willing to do the basic 'show up at work and be held accountable to your job' sort of work ethic.  I call those slackers.  When they try to enforce their beliefs, Left or Right, on society, I call that authoritarianism.

Authoritarian Slackers.

That is Congress.

And our current political atmosphere.

I've had it with that sort of outlook.

Hell if you could just get a few folks in the House to put a rider on each and every bill that 'Congress shall sit in session for 8 hours every weekday, every working non-federal holiday, and will only get the week of the 4th of July and two weeks off for Christmas and New Years' on them, then I might even begin to take such a political movement SERIOUSLY.

Then you can start thinking about a party structure that doesn't enforce elitism, doesn't look to drive people away from public office and one that doesn't see the concentration of power as a 'good thing'.  My bet is if you get the culture part right, the rest will follow pretty well.  And you just might want to think about that 'party' idea and stop thinking of it being top-down.  But then I've written about that before, too, along with ethics of such a thing. Because who wants to be a part of a party that tells YOU what to do, when you are well nigh set up to do that for yourself?  And join with others that agree with you to work together.

A good use of liberty, that.

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What I haven't been doing

Yes the marked decrease in output is due directly to multiple problems on a personal level.  None of them are, hopefully, permanent, but all require time, attention and energy, thus making more than casual reading and commenting a problem.  That hasn't stopped me from writing, but it is mostly inconsequential.

I've been doing some background gathering of my scattered fictional pieces at my alternative fiction site, stood up just to regularize that material a bit.  Longer works are posted there, and I spent some time getting a semi-decent navigation system set up.  As few blog types are set up to deal with what I needed (more a virtual bookshelf of material than a blog) that called for hand-making it and playing with posting dates and such.  I am trying to make it easier on the reader to navigate, rather than to hunt around like here.  What I really need is a good indexing system for posts that is semi-automatic, and going back and tagging a few hundred posts is not all that appealing.

Physical health of myself and my loved ones is a higher concern, and that has absorbed much of my time.

My hours in the Land of Grey are a bit higher than usual due to this.

 

When I get time and energy I comment elsewhere, and that is pretty rare on its own.

 

After that is normalizing my Amendment II needs for personal and property protection, plus personal enjoyment.  That fits time when I'm not doing any of the above, or trying to get the Pico-ITX system constructed.  That latter is down to motherboard mounting, the right screws and then making sure there is some airflow through it... and getting the basic inputs and outputs connected via the unusual but standard connectors on-board the system.

I expect that some fiction (the Free Land and Citizen's Militia stuff) will still appear here and at the new site.

 

Posting will be at an erratic level until some stability returns.

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Well, what is your definition of 'terrorism'?

This is the one quite tiring thing about the modern media, the Left and those who can't be bothered to actually find the definition of a word: they think that the concept backing the word is ever fluent and attempt to put that into a state of flux by claiming that it has changed. And yet the United States has firm backing on what terrorism is, it comes to us from our understanding of what a Nation State is, what our responsibilities as citizens of Nations are, and from our own history with regards to the English Common Law. The attempt to do so and how woeful our entire education system is, across the board, becomes clearly visible when NBC reporter Brian Williams tries to ask Gov. Palin about what terrorism is on 23 OCT 2008 with both Gov. Palin and Sen. McCain:

Brian Williams: Back to the notion of terrorists and terrorism. This word has come up in relation to Mr. Ayers...ah... hanging out with terrorists...

Gov. Palin: Yes... yes...

BW: ...ah domestic terrorists...

GP: ...yes..

BW: Are we changing... ah... its been said that it gives it a vaguely post-9/11 hint using that word that we don't normally associate with domestic crimes. Are we changing the definition? Are the people who set fire to American cities during the 60's terrorists? And under this definition is an abortion clinic bomber a terrorist, under this definition? Governor?

That is transcribed, by me, in the video linked to this page at MSNBC.

First notice that terrorism is no longer an act, but a 'notion'. It is not something someone does, but an idea about something someone does. That is an attempt to remove it from being a positive identification of an activity in which the activity defines the word associated with it. If Brian Williams has a good and serviceable definition of 'terrorism' as an activity descriptor, it would be appropriate for him to put that out so that there is no question in the mind of the viewer of what is being asked. If he had done so, then he could have been corrected on what Gov. Palin or Sen. McCain consider the actual activity of terrorism to describe.

Apparently there is a 'notion' that terrorism might have a different meaning when applied to domestic forms and international forms. And if Brian Williams is implying that there is a shift or difference between them, he must positively identify what those are: he must actually put those down as definitions. As he does not, as he leaves it nebulous, as he cannot identify the activities that define the word 'terrorist' then he must admit to his utter and complete cluelessness and ask: 'What is your definition of terrorism as you understand it, Gov. Palin, as I do not have a grasp of the concept'.

Yes that is a pretty pointed hit to make on Brian Williams.

He deserves it.

Because no matter how and interviewee answers the question, they can be attacked for assuming a definition and never clearly stating it. The proper counter is to state what you see terrorism as being and why it is pertinent to the Nation and to the law. Otherwise the individual being interviewed will now be caught in 'gotchya journalism' where a journalist takes a partisan stance and yet never, once, articulates that they are taking such a stance. By not stating that he is confused about the definition of 'terrorism' and putting on airs that he DOES and that he KNOWS BETTER than his interviewee, Brian Williams is attempting to elevate himself above the individual being interviewed AND play 'gotchya journalism'.

I had always thought one of the prime Cardinal Rules of journalism was NEVER to ask something without giving a proper underpinning for the question. Especially if you don't know what those underpinnings actually ARE. Because doing otherwise is not journalism to elucidate the viewer but journalism to advocate an incoherent position, which is exactly what Brian Williams is doing.

I do have some criticism for Gov. Palin: if the person interviewing you is clueless, then take the 'schoolmarm' approach and walk them through it step by step to clear up the uncertainty, no matter how long that takes. Starting out with: 'Well, Brian, you apparently don't know what terrorism IS so I will help you with that with my understanding of it and we can have a discussion in which we can accurately describe it'. It is a killer response as the interviewer dare not give any excuse to NOT have a civil discussion to come to some form of common understanding that you can both work with for the period of the interview. Yes, call him on his lack of knowledge, unwillingness to state a definition and clearly demonstrate that you are willing to set a term for this discussion that you both can understand and then compare it to different activities to see how it FITS.

Unfortunately Gov. Palin does not do so and does not call Brian Williams on his lack of knowledge while imputing that he has all the answers and will play 'gotchya' no matter what you say.

Even worse is that Brian Williams does not have a clear understanding between normal, domestic violence and the acts of war relegated to the Nation to protect the State. We put down hard and fast demarcation of these two things as they are entirely different in aspect and form, even when both using similar forms of violence. Indeed, we have clearly defined that those pre-meditated acts to kill individuals because they simply disagree with you on civil topics as MURDER. Indeed we get entire categories of manslaughter, homicide, and 'crimes against humanity' to try and cover these. Those acts have different goals and aims even while using the same devices, so that a bombing of a private abortion clinic and that of say, oh, the Pentagon, fall into two different categories when taken as pre-meditated acts with different goals, but their results may be something other. Brian Williams obviously cannot define these differences, so I will give it a whirl as I've been looking at the basis of terrorism for quite awhile and it seems there is a good and potent description available.

To understand terrorism we must understand the power that We the People hand to the national government via our Compact known as the Constitution. As I have written a bit about this topic, I will just put down links to my past work in the area of defining terrorism going from oldest to latest: link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, link 10, link 11, link 12, link 13, link 14, link 15, link 16, link 17, link 18, link 19, link 20, link 21, link22. What is even better is that I started out in the clueless category! Going through those puts one through the twists and turns of thinking, looking at all the 'notions' of terrorism and then realizing that a good, hard and fast definition did once exist and that our very own Founders knew about it and included it in the Constitution. Of course they didn't call it 'terrorism' back then, but they had a functional category in which terrorism falls, and to get to that you end up concentrating on my articles linked 18-21. I have revisited the question of terrorism since then, but the overarching category and differences between civil crime and the category terrorism falls into are extreme and telling.

As everyone loves the Constitution and as it serves as the repository for the power given to the National government by the people, I wrote a nice article on those things that are actually in the Constitution but not written down. So as to not bore the reader I will encapsulate just a bit: the US Constitution has one explicit mention of a source available to be used in making law and two implicit ones via the nature of our breaking with Britain. One is, actually, stated in the US Constitution and was much talked about during the process of ratification as many wanted to ensure that we had a regularized Nation that fit the proper bill for allocation of powers and ensuring that too much was not given to the National government. That work was most certainly known by Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Hamilton, Monroe, Jay and most of the Founders as they bothered to mention it and the body of understanding that backed it in that era. It is explicitly stated in Article I, Section 8:

To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;

Note the joining ",and" which makes these two separate areas that are combined under one conceptual framework? Not only are Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas given to Congress for US vessels, but other Offenses against the Law of Nations is included in that. While both of these fall under the common area under examination, the former gets its hard and fast roots via the first international understanding of law: Black Book of the Admiralty. That was first compiled around 1450 and served as the international basis for understanding Sovereignty over maritime trade, and defines what laws are in place where and why. Those laws are themselves drawn from the remains of the old Roman Laws of trade and become the basis for all following international understanding of what you can and cannot do with maritime vessels. The US Congress has expanded that understanding to include all air space above and subsurface structures below those areas and that goes all the way to the core of the planet and covers all possible modes of transport up to the very edge of the atmosphere. Without the Black Book, you don't get modern ideas of terrorism although the area of definition that includes terrorism would still develop.

Now to get to the Law of Nations, one must go through On the Laws of War and Peace by Hugo Grotius in 1625. For a guy who's name gets dropped so often, I do wonder why no one reads him... be that as it may, right in Book I, Chapter 3 he gets to the heart of things:

I. THE first and most necessary divisions of war are into one kind called private, another public, and another mixed. Now public war is carried on by the person holding the sovereign power. Private war is that which is carried on by private persons without authority from the state. A mixed war is that which is carried on, on one side by public authority, and on the other by private persons. But private war, from its greater antiquity, is the first subject for inquiry.

The proofs that have been already produced, to shew that to repel violence is not repugnant to natural law, afford a satisfactory reason to justify private war, as far as the law of nature is concerned. But perhaps it may be thought that since public tribunals have been erected, private redress of wrongs is not allowable. An objection which is very just. Yet although public trials and courts of Justice are not institutions of nature, but erected by the invention of men, yet as it is much more conducive to the peace of society for a matter in dispute to be decided by a disinterested person, than by the partiality and prejudice of the party aggrieved, natural justice and reason will dictate the necessity and advantage of every one's submitting to the equitable decisions of public judges. Paulus, the Lawyer, observes that "what can be done by a magistrate with the authority of the state should never be intrusted to individuals; as private redress would give rise to greater disturbance. And "the reason, says King Theodoric, why laws were invented, was to prevent any one from using personal violence, for wherein would peace differ from all the confusion of war, if private disputes were terminated by force?" And the law calls it force for any man to seize what he thinks his due, without seeking a legal remedy.

[..]

IV. Public war, according to the law of nations, is either SOLEMN, that is FORMAL, or LESS SOLEMN, that is INFORMAL. The name of lawful war is commonly given to what is here called formal, in the same sense in which a regular will is opposed to a codicil, or a lawful marriage to the cohabitation of slaves. This opposition by no means implies that it is not allowed to any man, if he pleases, to make a codicil, or to slaves to cohabit in matrimony, but only, that, by the civil law, FORMAL WILLS and SOLEMN MARRIAGES, were attended with peculiar privileges and effects. These observations were the more necessary ; because many, from a misconception of the word just or lawful, think that all wars, to which those epithets do not apply, are condemned as unjust and unlawful. Now to give a war the formality required by the law of nations, two things are necessary. In the first place it must be made on both sides, by the sovereign power of the state, and in the next place it must be accompanied with certain formalities. Both of which are so essential that one is insufficient without the other.

Now a public war, LESS SOLEMN, may be made without those formalities, even against private persons, and by any magistrate whatever. And indeed, considering the thing without respect to the civil law, every magistrate, in case of resistance, seems to have a right to take up arms, to maintain his authority in the execution of his offices; as well as to defend the people committed to his protection. But as a whole state is by war involved in danger, it is an established law in almost all nations that no war can be made but by the authority of the sovereign in each state. There is such a law as this in the last book of Plato ON LAWS. And by the Roman law, to make war, or levy troops without a commission from the Prince was high treason. According to the Cornelian law also, enacted by Lucius Cornelius Sylla, to do so without authority from the people amounted to the same crime. In the code of Justinian there is a constitution, made by Valentinian and Valens, that no one should bear arms without their knowledge and authority. Conformably to this rule, St. Augustin says, that as peace is most agreeable to the natural state of man, it is proper that Princes should have the sole authority to devise and execute the operations of war. Yet this general rule, like all others, in its application must always be limited by equity and discretion.

Here we go! The three types of war: Public, Private and Mixed. Public war is according to the law of nations (not yet at that time a standardized work but a body of knowledge), Private war is that taken up by individuals, and Mixed war is taken up by the State and individuals against each other although the State must take active martial measures for it to be considered 'Mixed War' although the case can be made that the target type of Private War inflicted on a State is alone enough to give it that title. It is an understanding that we have, to this day, about the necessity of laws, civil resolution of disputes and entrusting the negative liberty of warfare to the Nation State. The very basics are set up: if you seek redress for grievances via legal means, then you are upholding the law and civil society; if you use means of war to bring disputes to an end or enforce our beliefs, then you are utilizing Private war to gain your ends.

In Book II, Chapter 22 he goes into negative liberty:

XI. But neither the independence of individuals, nor that of states, is a motive that can at all times justify recourse to arms, as if all persons INDISCRIMINATELY had a natural right to do so. For where liberty is said to be a natural right belonging to all men and states, by that expression is understood a right of nature, antecedent to every human obligation or contract. But in that case, liberty is spoken of in a negative sense, and not by way of contrast to independence, the meaning of which is, that no one is by the law of nature doomed to servitude, though he is not forbidden by that law to enter into such a condition. For in this sense no one can be called free, if nature leaves him not the privilege of chusing his own condition: as Albutius pertinently remarks, "the terms, freedom and servitude are not founded in the principles of nature, but are names subsequently applied to men according to the dispositions of fortune." And Aristotle defines the relations of master and servant to be the result of political and not of natural appointment. Whenever therefore the condition of servitude, either personal or political, subsists, from lawful causes, men should be contented with that state, according to the injunction of the Apostle, "Art thou called, being a servant, let not that be an anxious concern?"

XII. And there is equal injustice in the desire of reducing, by force of arms, any people to a state of servitude, under the pretext of its being the condition for which they are best qualified by nature. It does not follow that, because any one is fitted for a particular condition, another has a right to impose it upon him. For every reasonable creature ought to be left free in the choice of what may be deemed useful or prejudicial to him, provided another has no just right to a controul over him.

The case of children has no connection with the question, as they are necessarily under the discipline of others.

[..]

XVI. As the imperfect obligations of charity, and other virtues of the same kind are not cognizable in a court of justice, so neither can the performance of them be compelled by force of arms. For it is not the moral nature of a duty that can enforce its fulfillment, but there must be some legal right in one of the parties to exact the obligation. For the moral obligation receives an additional weight from such a right. This obligation therefore must be united to the former to give a war the character of a just war. Thus a person who has conferred a favour, has not, strictly speaking, a RIGHT to demand a return, for that would be converting an act of kindness into a contract.

XVII. It is necessary to observe that a war may be just in its origin, and yet the intentions of its authors may become unjust in the course of its prosecution. For some other motive, not unlawful IN ITSELF, may actuate them more powerfully than the original right, for the attainment of which the war was begun. It is laudable, for instance, to maintain national honour; it is laudable to pursue a public or a private interest, and yet those objects may not form the justifiable grounds of the war in question.A war may gradually change its nature and its object from the prosecution of a right to the desire of seconding or supporting the aggrandizement of some other power. But such motives, though blamable, when even connected with a just war, do not render the war ITSELF unjust, nor invalidate its conquests.

Negative liberty is given by the Law of Nature, not the laws of man, thus every man is born with them. That does not mean that everyone need practice them, as Independence gives one the ability to use reason on the exercise of their liberties, positive and negative. We give our negative liberty of war to the Nation State to practice so that we may have regular and lawful conduct amongst ourselves and seek resolution within that common framework.

Private war, then, is that exercise of the negative liberty of warfare for oneself and one's own goals outside of the Nation State.

Now this is different from Privateering which is a Nation State sanctioned enterprise as given in Book III, Chapter 2:

IV. Another method of obtaining redress for any violation of persons, or property is by having recourse to what, in modern language, are called REPRISALS, which the Saxons and Angles denominated WITHERNAM, and to which the French gave the name of LETTERS OF MARQUE, and those were usually obtained from the crown.

V. It is generally understood that recourse may be had to this method of redress not only against a foreign aggressor, but also against a debtor, if justice cannot be obtained in due time: but in NOTORIOUS cases, which admit of no doubt, this right may be enforced even beyond the strict letter of the law. For even in DOUBTFUL matters, the presumption will always be in favour of judges appointed by public authority. For it is unlikely that they should GREATLY, or WANTONLY exceed their power; especially when, if so inclined, they have not the same means of enforcing their decrees against foreigners, as against their fellow subjects. Indeed even in disputes between subjects of the same country, they cannot annul a just debt. Paulus, the Lawyer, says that a REAL DEBTOR, though discharged, owing to some informality or inability of the law to enforce payment, still remains a debtor according to the law of nature.

And when, in consequence of a judicial sentence, a creditor, under pretext of seizing his own property, had taken from a debtor something which did not belong to him though it was in his possession: upon the discharge of the debt, a doubt arising whether the thing should be restored to the debtor, Scaevola maintained that it certainly ought to be restored.

There is a difference between the two cases. For subjects, AS SUCH, cannot make any violent resistance to the execution of a sentence, which they may not deem satisfactory, nor can they prosecute any right in opposition to the law. FOREIGNERS may use violent means to enforce a right: tho' they are not justified in using such means, while there is any possibility of obtaining redress in a legal, and peaceable manner.

It is on such grounds that reprisals are made upon the persons and property of the subjects, belonging to a power, who refuses to grant redress and reparation for injuries and aggressions. It is a practice not literally enacted by the law of nature, but generally received through custom. It is a practice too of the greatest antiquity: for in the eleventh book of the Iliad, we find Nestor giving an account of the reprisals, which he had made upon the Epeian nation, from whom he took a great number of cattle, as a satisfaction for a prize which his father Nelcus had won at the Elian games; and for debts due to many private subjects of the Pylian kingdom. Out of this booty the king having selected his own due, equitably divided the rest among the other creditors.

Privateering is the Public sanction by legal means to redress grievances against unaccountable individuals who wage Private war upon the Nation State. These go by the Letters of Marque and reprisal also handed to Congress in Article I, Section 8:

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

The US Congress gets the ENTIRE suite of war declaration powers, and making rules to cover them. It goes far beyond Public war and formally declared war, but into the Nation State exercising its Public powers to authorize individuals to wage war and extract a 1:1 reprisal against those waging Private war upon the Nation State. Thus it can be used aggressively, in acts to seek reprisals by individuals against a Nation and to go after those waging Private war. If another Nation has caused harm less than that which would warrant full warfare but which is still a grievous harm to which that Nation causing same refuses to be held accountable for taking, then private individuals can be given warrant and legal authority to execute damage and captures upon such Nations. Do note that this is not individuals going 'freebooter' but individuals seeking legal sanction from their Nation to wage less than full public war upon another Nation or those waging Private war. In the United States those individuals and their companies can be directly ORDERED by the President to go after those things that Congress sanctions and against those Nations or Individuals in their singularity or groups that have harmed the Nation.

Pirates have no sanction and thus fall into Private war. Their goals are usually profit or to seize goods, but they also seek to exercise non-National power over those they can cause to fear them.

Private war, then, is not only done by individuals but has no Nation State sanctions or accountability attached to them by those waging it.

Now, with that in mind we can head to the Law of Nations by Emmerich de Vattel which was one of the first attempts to give a coherent overview to just what Nation States are and how they operate. In much the way that the Laws of Nature are descriptive and the Laws of the High Seas and War and Peace are descriptive, they are descriptive of a common set of actions attributable to individuals and Nations. No matter where you go in history, if you see the rise of a State, you see the same parts that show up in it appear over and over again, even when disconnected by geography so that one cannot communicate to the other. Moving from the individual in their natural state to a Nation in its derived State gets the same described powers and abilities that accrue due to necessity of the being, not due to having written it down. Thus categories of power in a Nation State are descriptive, but their logic that underpins them is proscriptive: to get the State you get the necessities that go with it and see the derived function which can be described.

So, when War comes up in Book III, this is how it is seen:

§ 4. It belongs only to the sovereign power.(137)

As nature has given men no right to employ force, unless when it becomes necessary for self defence and the preservation of their rights (Book II. § 49, &c.), the inference is manifest, that, since the establishment of political societies, a right, so dangerous in its exercise, no longer remains with private persons except in those encounters where society cannot protect or defend them. In the bosom of society, the public authority decides all the disputes of the citizens, represses violence, and checks every attempt to do ourselves justice with our own hands. If a private person intends to prosecute his right against the subject of a foreign power, he may apply to the sovereign of his adversary, or to the magistrates invested with the public authority: and if he is denied justice by them, he must have recourse to his own sovereign, who is obliged to protect him. It would be too dangerous to allow every citizen the liberty of doing himself justice against foreigners; as, in that case, there would not be a single member of the state who might not involve it in war. And how could peace be preserved between nations, if it were in the power of every private individual to disturb it? A right of so momentous a nature, — the right of judging whether the nation has real grounds of complaint, whether she is authorized to employ force, and justifiable in taking up arms, whether prudence will admit of such a step, and whether the welfare of the state requires it, — that right, I say, can belong only to the body of the nation, or to the sovereign, her representative. It is doubtless one of those rights, without which there can be no salutary government, and which are therefore called rights of majesty (Book I. § 45).

Thus the sovereign power alone is possessed of authority to make war. But, as the different rights which constitute this power, originally resident in the body of the nation, may be separated or limited according to the will of the nation (Book I. § 31 and 45), it is from the particular constitution of each state, that we are to learn where the power resides, that is authorized to make war in the name of the society at large. The kings of England, whose power is in other respects so limited, have the right of making war and peace.1 Those of Sweden have lost it. The brilliant but ruinous exploits of Charles XII. sufficiently warranted the states of that kingdom to reserve to themselves a right of such importance to their safety.

Here Sovereignty is held by the Nation but executed by those invested with Sovereign power. Republics tend to divide up those powers in many different ways, but the powers themselves are still accrued to the State and then given to the Nation which protects it. Remember, this was not only known about before the Revolution, but was a working body of knowledge actively talked about all the way up to the 19th century. Later in Book III a higher level of definition is given between Public and Private war:

§ 67. It is to be distinguished from informal and unlawful war.

Legitimate and formal warfare must be carefully distinguished from those illegitimate and informal wars, or rather predatory expeditions, undertaken either without lawful authority or without apparent cause, as likewise without the usual formalities, and solely with a view to plunder. Grotius relates several instances of the latter.5 Such were the enterprises of the grandes compagnies which had assembled in France during the wars with the English, — armies of banditti, who ranged about Europe, purely for spoil and plunder: such were the cruises of the buccaneers, without commission, and in time of peace; and such in general are the depredations of pirates. To the same class belong almost all the expeditions of the Barbary corsairs: though authorized by a sovereign, they are undertaken without any apparent cause, and from no other motive than the lust of plunder. These two species of war, I say, — the lawful and the illegitimate, — are to be carefully distinguished, as the effects and the rights arising from each are very different.

§ 68. Grounds of this distinction.

In order fully to conceive the grounds of this distinction, it is necessary to recollect the nature and object of lawful war. It is only as the last remedy against obstinate injustice that the law of nature allows of war. Hence arise the rights which it gives, as we shall explain in the sequel: hence, likewise, the rules to be observed in it. Since it is equally possible that either of the parties may have right on his side, — and since, in consequence of the independence of nations, that point is not to be decided by others (§ 40), — the condition of the two enemies is the same, while the war lasts. Thus, when a nation, or a sovereign, has declared war against another sovereign on account of a difference arisen between them, their war is what among nations is called a lawful and formal war; and its effects are, by the voluntary law of nations, the same on both sides, independently of the justice of the cause, as we shall more fully show in the sequel.6 Nothing of this kind is the case in an informal and illegitimate war, which is more properly called depredation. Undertaken without any right, without even an apparent cause, it can be productive of no lawful effect, nor give any right to the author of it. A nation attacked by such sort of enemies is not under any obligation to observe towards them the rules prescribed in formal warfare. She may treat them as robbers,(146a) The inhabitants of Geneva, after defeating the famous attempt to take their city by escalade,7 caused all the prisoners whom they took from the Savoyards on that occasion to be hanged up as robbers, who had come to attack them without cause and without a declaration of war. Nor were the Genevese censured for this proceeding, which would have been detested in a formal war.

The rationale for the distinction is clear and decisive: individuals who would be allowed to make wanton warfare would decay the State to one of anarchy and the rule of the Law of Nature. When individuals, on land or sea, take to making war without sanction, they practice Private war no matter what their stated goals are: they are acting on their own and taking up the negative liberty of war which civilized peoples have handed to the Nation State ALONE to use.

Finally there is the English Common Law which has basis for this understanding. English legal scholar William Blackstone worked with Emmerich de Vattel on the Law of Nations and Blackstone would then return to England and give the most salient overview of how that worked in England via Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765-1769 (a free text from scanned source at the Avalon Project; better edited text at The Laws of Nature And Nature's God). We can read the following from Public Wrongs in Book 4, and Chapter 5 Of the Law of Nations:

THE principal offense against the law of nations, animadverted on as such by the municipal laws of England, are of three kinds; 1. Violation of safe-conducts; 2. Infringement of the rights of ambassadors; and, 3. Piracy.

[..]

LASTLY, the crime of piracy, or robbery and depredation upon the high seas, is an offense against the universal law of society; a pirate being, according to Sir Edward Coke,10 hostis humani generis [enemy to mankind]. As therefore he has renounced all the benefits of society and government, and has reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature, by declaring war against all mankind, all mankind must declare war against him: so that every community has a right, by the rule of self-defense, to inflict that punishment upon him, which every individual would in a state of nature have been otherwise entitled to do, any invasion of his person or personal property.

BY the ancient common law, piracy, if committed by a subject, was held to be a species of treason, being contrary to his natural allegiance; and by an alien to be felony only: but now, since the statute of treasons, 25 Edw. III. c. 2. it is held to be only felony in a subject.11 Formerly it was only cognizable by the admiralty courts, which proceed by the rule of the civil law.12 But, it being inconsistent with the liberties of the nation, that any man's life should be taken away, unless by the judgment of his peers, or the common law of the land, the statute 28 Hen. VIII. c. 15. established a new jurisdiction for this purpose; which proceeds according to the course of the common law, and of which we shall say more hereafter.

Note that Piracy is a great worry to the island Nation of England as it is the greatest source of revenue it has via trade. The more general view that is taken up is one that we understand, even though the SCOTUS rules that we cannot use the rulings of Coke and, indeed, must go back to King William for the actual powers of the Nation State over the high and near Seas. That is the Black Book of the Admiralty which was compiled some time thereafter, but remains the cornerstone of understanding of what authority Nations have on the high Seas. British Admiralty courts can be cited, but only to demonstrate how a Nation with a similar understanding of its Admiralty powers rules according to its derived laws.

Even with that, Blackstone is giving a wider view of piracy as he defines it as an action taken by the enemy of mankind. That such an enemy reverts to the law of nature against society and government, and has reduced himself into savagery by declaring war against all mankind. Also note the law of nature provides the right of self-defense as part of the negative liberty of war, a right that cannot be abolished just as the negative liberty of war cannot be abolished, as it includes any invasion of a person or his property without legal sanction.

Even better is that the US Army has had a good and functional description of 'terrorism' in the past for when it was on active duty. Here is the relevant passage:

Art. 82.

Men, or squads of men, who commit hostilities, whether by fighting, or inroads for destruction or plunder, or by raids of any kind, without commission, without being part and portion of the organized hostile army, and without sharing continuously in the war, but who do so with intermitting returns to their homes and avocations, or with the occasional assumption of the semblance of peaceful pursuits, divesting themselves of the character or appearance of soldiers - such men, or squads of men, are not public enemies, and, therefore, if captured, are not entitled to the privileges of prisoners of war, but shall be treated summarily as highway robbers or pirates.

That comes from this document:

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF ARMIES OF THE UNITED STATES IN THE FIELD

Prepared by Francis Lieber, promulgated as General Orders No. 100 by President Lincoln, 24 April 1863.

These activities are still war, lest we forget that and can be sanctioned by On the Laws of War and Peace as described by Hugo Grotius and has been seen in the Law of Nations and in the English Common Law.

On top of that there is this bit from the US Code in 18 USC 1651:

Sec. 1651. Piracy under law of nations

Whoever, on the high seas, commits the crime of piracy as defined by the law of nations, and is afterwards brought into or found in the United States, shall be imprisoned for life.

As we have seen piracy is a bit more than bottles of rum, parrots, and malnutrition with poor hygiene. The Law of Nations goes a bit further than 18 USC 1651, but that is only the first of the Piracy statutes and the Law of Nations makes it quite clear that the high Seas are only a part of this, though the relevant part for the US Admiralty power. Actually for the very few laws that are very well defined and delineated in that section of 18 USC, it makes for a lot easier reading of the double handful of sentences than the 900 paragraph 'terrorism' laws do. Apparently Congress once knew how to write brief and easy to understand laws.

We now have the ability to describe terrorism by the actions taken as those of Private war.

First - It is utilization of war by personal means. That can be in groups of individuals as seen with Pirates, bandit armies, and roving bands of thieves which was a problem for the USSR in 1929.

Second - It is unsanctioned by any Nation State.

That is IT.

Intent plays no part in this determination.

That by legal history the US was founded on, the understanding of the founders, and the written powers put into the Constitution plus the legal tradition of the written rulings retained to guide future rulings is the understanding of the United States on what 'terrorism' is as I understand it.

Did Bill Ayers practice Private war? Yes. His organization declared war on the United States while having no standing to do so. They reverted to a state of primitive savagery to become enemies of society and the Nation.

Did Eric Rudolph practice Private war? Yes. He utilized bombings to compel activities of society and the Nation to end with no legal standing to do so. He reverted to savagery to enforce his will on society using warlike means without sanction.

Did those who 'burned cities' during the 60's practice Private war? Did they utilize the means of war without sanction? Setting fires can be this thing known as 'arson' and done without using weapons of war. That is a civil crime that does not take place in the realm of warfare. If they utilized the ways and means of warfare along with their criminal actions to stop others from putting out such fires, then they did, indeed, practice private and unsanctioned war to their own ends.

That is how you let the action determine how it is tagged.

It is quite simple to note that there is NO DIFFERENCE between DOMESTIC and FOREIGN activities in the realm of Private war. That is intentional by those who described the Law of Nations as it exists everywhere there are Nations and is an over-riding concern to all Nations that attempts to destroy Nations by ANYONE must be stopped. That is how the Tamil Tigers who have had so few activities against the US that you can pretty easily count them, get on the Foreign Terrorist Organization listing at the State Dept. They are practicing Private war, even if none of the bureaucrats can actually DEFINE IT.

That is too much for the MSM, elite political class and all of the Left to figure out... and most of the Right come to think of it. But then actually calling savage and uncivilized behavior for what it is isn't nice, now, is it?

No one ever said civilization was 'nice', just necessary to civil discourse and common laws.

Perhaps Brian Williams can stop playing 'gotchya journalism' and see if he can find a clue someplace.

Sphere: Related Content

Management of Savagery - The 'weak horse'

There are few publications that utilize the foreign policy of the US as one of its contingent points, and fewer still that encapsulate decades of US views to its goals.  One of those is The Management of Savagery by Abu Bakr Naji, Translated by William McCants at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.  This is one of the few strategic doctrine articles we have from al Qaeda and I have reviewed it in quick and deeper reviews, and find it nearly impossible to drudge through the fantastical viewpoints given within it.  Part of the problem for the western analyst is in the fact that it is based on a fantasy ideology expecting that the supernatural will intervene if believers just do certain things.  That is following the analysis by Lee Harris of al Qaeda's fantasy ideology, but it is extensible to other organizations using different forms of fantastical basis for doctrine no matter what their form.  Yet the basis for those actions is rooted in actual real-world events, so that the fantastical can be used to explain them.  When it comes to US foreign policy of the 1980's to 1990's, The Management of Savagery follows on Osama bin Laden's 'weak horse' concept of picking up supporters: they will know a weak horse when they see it and follow the strong horse.  While events in Iraq have gone decidedly against the views of the US being a 'weak horse', Afghanistan has proven more problematical as al Qaeda and its Talibani allies have had safe refuge in parts of Pakistan, and other surrounding States.  Initial support from 'enemy regimes' by al Qaeda in Iraq proved to be insufficient to keeping a long-term insurgency going when civil society turned against it.  In Afghanistan the Pashtun regions stretching across Pakistan and into Afghanistan are less well defined and more porous to ethnic ties and money, plus the Afghani native Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's long lasting criminal/terrorist organization that stretches from western China all the way to London.

 

US Cold War Foreign Policy and Military Policy

The United States, in a 'weak horse' position is in no position to help this out.  Currently the situation in Afghanistan is slowly shifting the balance of viewpoint from the US as 'strong horse' to that as 'weak horse' and threats against Pakistan (or any ethnic sub-group) beyond fully known and designated groups does not help.  A shift in position to remove these organizations without destroying their backing ethnic groups is a major requirement as genocide is a result of not discriminating between those pushing for private war and those caught unable to resist it.  The United States, for all its puissance of arms by its National level forces, is not in a position to exploit the powers of its legitimate non-State forces as given to Congress.  There has been a general abhorrence by the political Left and Right to doing this as it shifts the US from late 19th/early 20th century Nation State concepts and late 20th century concepts of Nation States in Global concerns to ones of late 18th century and early 19th century ones.

And yet that is a valid part of the solution space as that space must recognize the cultural utilization of non-National armed forces.  This concept has the modern term of 'asymmetrical warfare' applied to it, and is generally held to be one of non-State actors that are illegitimate against legitimate National armed forces.  That coin has an obverse side, however, in which legitimized sub-State forces can be used against non-legitimized non-State forces: that is a direct Constitutional power backed by the Law of Nations and by the views of warfare to address National grievances against such actors by the utilization of the Letters of Marque and Reprisal in the 1:1 rule - for each dollar of damage incurred, the Nation can legitimately incur $1 of damage to the non-legitimate forces.  As non-legitimate forces tend to be smaller in funding base than Nation States, this spells an asymmetrical application of force as those forces that are private and legitimized will have a stronger economic backing than those that do not seek National means of legitimization.

That potent tool to bring non-National and non-Legitimate forces to heel or end them has been one that has gained the dark cloud of past utilizations of it going awry.  Yet, for all the advances of the modern State, the modern practitioners do not seem willing to utilize the exact, same technical and legal methodologies on such forces.  Politically this is an untenable solution to a political system that is entrenched in post-World War, post-Cold War and Transnationalist/Globalist encroachment.  Yet it is that exact, same set of politics that causes the US to weaken its stances on liberty and freedom and to run from difficult fights that yield no immediate positive economically or politically, and yet serve as a representation of the ideals of personal liberty and freedom the Nation was founded on.

By the mid-20th century (post-WWII) US Foreign Policy was set to a Cold War system in which stasis was the best achievable goal for the long haul.  So long as the 'balance of power' was kept stable, there was no long term threat to Western society.  Yet long-term threats that were non-Soviet in origin did appear in the form of radical Islamic views and continued ethnic problems in many parts of the world.  Additionally the political atmosphere at home shifted from the survival and retribution concepts for military analysis that was predominant in WWII to ones of insular stagnation and unwillingness to confront despotism and tyranny.  That was across the political spectrum and created a dichotomy of inaction: if the political Left wanted intervention into poor countries with no National interest to the US, the Right would not support such; and if the Right wanted to confront the USSR on even minor stands, the Left was loathe to expend any funds or lives in helping others to retain liberty and freedom.

The return to military recruitment normalcy via ending the draft was a major shift in military stance by the US, as it was the traditional route of the Nation to have an all-volunteer military.  This would actually free up the economy (so as to end the 'guns vs butter' debate) and that shift taking place before the end of the Cold War caused a major shock, globally, as the US did not need to expend anywhere the level of commitment the USSR was expending as a percentage of GDP to meet the Soviet threat.  The US had outgrown its opponent, although nuclear annihilation was still possible, economic collapse in accord to Leninist doctrine was impossible.  Within 20 years of ending the draft and re-scaling the armed forces, the Soviet Union collapsed as it could no longer keep so much economic output going to military affairs and overlook its population.  The threat that grew up during the latter part of this era (approx. 1963 to present) was that of non-State military actors utilizing terrorist tactics to political goals.  These non-State actors faced an increasingly insular United States and an increasingly stagnant and crumbling Soviet Union that could still be vicious but could actually overextend itself to no good.

US Foreign Policy and Military Policy both refused to address non-State actors in any meaningful way and actually would recoil from them multiple times, thus empowering the 'weak horse' concept of the US.  With unstopped successful attacks, these non-State actors grew in size and viciousness in the post-Cold War era to an extent that could not be conceived in the Cold War.

 

Al Qaeda and the milieu of Central Asia

If Pakistan is the last refuge of al Qaeda (although parts of Somalia and Kenya, along with the Tri-Border Area of South America may prove this to be a limited analysis), then it is a refuge already dominated by local players far stronger than al Qaeda is locally: the Mehsud brothers, Hekmatyar's huge organization and even the Baluchs of the south all have demonstrated capacity that far exceeds that of either al Qaeda or the Taliban.  Combined Hekmatyar's organization and that of the ethnically different Baluchs are individually as strong, although only Hekmatyar's has greater reach, scope and longevity with the Baluchs more geographically isolated for scope and reach, but arguably far longer in terms of existing (the stand-up of Pakistan) than Hekmatyar's (and his rise under General Zia).  It is that milieu that allows al Qaeda to survive, not expand, when its attempt to expand in Iraq was crushed.  Iraq was a strategic level defeat for al Qaeda and a huge global set-back, but its grounding is not in any one area of victory, but to exist to support all of them and outlast its opposition.  That was the 1990's statement my bin Laden and The Management of Savagery fleshes this out by examining the USSR and USA (p.23 of the pdf file, bolding is mine):

Some others among the people of truthfulness and jihad used to set forth what God had showed them and the notion was established in their minds that the enemy was weak and insignificant – if God decreed something, it could be done. This group says to the remainder of the people of religion and the masses: “O people! The viciousness of the Russian soldier is double that of the American (soldier). If the number of Americans killed is one tenth of the number of Russians killed in Afghanistan and Chechnya, they will flee, heedless of all else. That is because the current structure of the American and Western military is not the same as the structure of their military in the era of colonialism. They reached a stage of effeminacy which made them unable to sustain battles for a long period of time and they compensate for this with a deceptive media halo. O people! The center in the Soviet Union was, to a certain extent, close to the countries in which there was opposition to it. They even shared borders with areas that opposed it, so supplies, motorized units, and armored vehicles used to pour in with ease and without much cost. The matter is different with regard to America—the remoteness of the primary center from the peripheries should help the Americans understand the difficulty of our continued submission to them, their control over us, and their pillaging of our resources if we decide to refuse; but only if we refuse and enflame opposition to its materialization.”

It is clear for that understanding by al Qaeda if God decrees an end to America, and giving America small but persistent death toll, that America would withdraw from the Middle East, Central Asia and, indeed, agree not to otherwise stand against those that will refuse to ever stop killing Americans.

Here the lines of the modern Leftist doctrine of the US being an 'imperial power' and the al Qaeda doctrinal examination of what happens when the Left is able to sway foreign policy outcomes (and this is a bi-partisan outcome, not limited to a single political party but a Leftist outcome of foreign policy in total across multiple administrations).  The US is not only weakened but perceived as weak.  If Iraq is a showcase that America can and indeed will counter that via reinforcing local culture that is Nation State oriented, then the work in Afghanistan becomes a more difficult situation as the strength of Nation State doctrine has been weak there since before the first Empires attempted to dominate that region.

This is telling in that the ages old anti-imperial strains of the native populations in Central Asia now are unwilling to accede to multi-ethnic Nation States as those are seen as contrary to the ethnic divisions necessary to survive multiple Empires (arguably from the earliest Persian to the Soviet Union).  US foreign policy has not, does not and will not come to terms with this until a President actually addresses it and creates a foreign policy that understands these basic problems of ethnicity and Nation States.  If the opposition to the ideology of Nation States as multi-ethnic (20th century oriented) concepts is one that is seen as Imperialist and foreign to the local ethnicities still fighting their formation, as part of a tradition going back thousands of years, then those trying to utilize Transnational Progressivism and Transnational Capitalist (or Globalist) views which both try to utilize local ethnic differences to desired social and economic ends are BOTH treated likewise: external attempts to utilize internal differences are ALL seen as Imperialist to such native ethnic groups.

If the 19th to 20th century Nation State and 19th to 21st century socialist to Transnationalist doctrines are ALL seen as external and Imperialist, what the hell is left to try, you may wonder.  If every modern conception of the Nation State and Transnational/Globalist views are seen as exterior and Imperial, then NO current formulation of foreign policy, National policy nor military policy can or will work there.  Central asia makes the Balkans look like child's play, and yet Western doctrine (Nationalist, Socialist, Communist and Transnationalist/Globalist) have, each and every one of them, fallen flat on their face there.

They are, all of them, 'weak horse' concepts as al Qaeda sees it.

 

The Ideology of Modern States and Analysis

That is a sobering conclusion to look at based on the factual analysis done by al Qaeda (no matter how fantastical its world view is) and an examination (even cursory such as this one is) of all the Empires that have dried up and gone away while the ethnic rivalries have continued on in various guises under various religions for thousands of years in the region.  You cannot 'surge' unless you have a sound doctrinal basis for COIN (Counter-Insurgency) that is based on a conceptualization that actually accepts the basic cultural problems and finds a coherent and workable solution to them.  More importantly, if the ethnic group and religious backing is one that looks towards fantastical ends, the ability to actually bring such groups and organizations to an end is highly limited: the ideology is one of not stopping as the simple acts can be done by very few people.  What is COIN if the society, itself, accepts continual insurgency as a working phenomena that is part of society?

Here the DIME vector analysis of the modern military falls apart along the lines I previously examined, as the sub-units (Diplomatic, Information, Military and Economic) are descriptive vectors and amenable to multi-level uses and counter-use.  These are vectors within society and culture, but oriented towards a mid-to-late 20th century view of Nation States: pluralistic, democratic, western liberal.  The use of these at the macro scale is an demonstration of power along those vectors on Nation States, but when applied to non-State actors and ethnic groups and a weak Nation State, they become very problematic.  Additionally, using them to countervail an insurgent/terrorist/ethnically backed non-State actor group is then seen as exterior or Imperialistic, and not a 'home grown' happening.  I will pull out this passage I put down in the previous article:

DIME has a problem in that it serves equally well to set up the structures to collapse society as it does to uphold it. DIME is known as a set of 'vectors': pathways of major parts of society and systems that need to move in coordinated fashion to achieve ends. They are a set of 'means' not 'ends'. And, as such, can be used in any number of paradigms for how to have society, how to govern and, apparently, how *not* to do those things. As a method of COIN we must recognize that the opponents of Counter Insurgency, namely Insurgency, utilizes these exact same vectors in opposition to orderly society. That is because these vectors are neutral to ideology and only means to an end, not ends in and of themselves. If we treat DIME in isolation to the underpinnings of society, then we shall soon have no society in common as it fractures under the multiple forces of transnationalism which seek to gain by that destruction. To counter that the actual goals of what DIME is utilized for must be clearly and succinctly stated and all activities traced directly back to those goals. DIME utilized without such goals then can be utilized in opposition and that opposition will tear up any society upholding group that does not put forward the goals first. In the military parlance this is known as the 'Grand Strategy'. It is more than just 'victory' but the reasons why victory is worthwhile and the goals of that victory BEYOND mere victory. If these are not clearly upheld at entry into a conflict, then there is no way to trace any lesser level strategy or tactics (the implementation tools and locales for strategy) back to the larger goal. In the realm of business this is the Corporate Business Plan or Outlook document, to sort out the major goals to be achieved by said business, and hiring folks to work in a business unit is mere tactics. In this realm of thought, DIME is a way of implementing Grand Strategy and NOT Grand Strategy in, and of, itself.

This is a crucial understanding of DIME, that relates to the fact that Grand Strategy is implemented via DIME and, indeed, a whole suite of vectors beyond DIME.  As a means of short-hand it is limited, and only useful in limited circumstances where there is a pre-existing coherent Grand Strategy and then implemented via a series of vectors of which DIME is a sub-set.  Unfortunately many authors have come to accept DIME as a strategy, not a means to implement strategy, and have missed the fact that without a coherent foreign and military policy to back it, DIME is a set of stateless vectors that can be utilized by anyone.  These policies are meant to give direction in which these vectors are to be organized, but utilizing them is a two-way street: the enemy gets a say, too.

 

Al Qaeda and Modern State Ideology Intersections

The Management of Savagery is part Grand Strategy, part Grand Tactics and fully fantastical in examining how expansive outcomes can come from limited means.  With that said it was drafted and created by an organization that was based in Afghanistan and had strong links to the Pashtun support network and the larger terror and criminal support networks of central asia and it reflects those understandings.  The aim of the doctrine is clearly spelled out in pp.24-25:

A – The first goal: Destroy a large part of the respect for America and spread confidence in the souls of Muslims by means of:

(1) Reveal the deceptive media to be a power without force.

(2) Force America to abandon its war against Islam by proxy and force it to attack directly so that the noble ones among the masses and a few of the noble ones among the armies of apostasy will see that their fear of deposing the regimes because America is their protector is misplaced and that when they depose the regimes, they are capable of opposing America if it interferes.

B – The second goal: Replace the human casualties sustained by the renewal movement during the past thirty years by means of the human aid that will probably come for two reasons:

(1) Being dazzled by the operations which will be undertaken in opposition to America.

(2) Anger over the obvious, direct American interference in the Islamic world, such that that anger compounds the previous anger against America's support for the Zionist entity. It also transforms the suppressed anger toward the regimes of apostasy and tyranny into a positive anger. Human aid for the renewal movement will not dry up, especially when heedless people among the masses – and they are the majority – discover the truth of the collaboration of these regimes with the enemies of the Umma to such an extent that no deceptive veil will be of use and no pretext will remain for any claimant to the Islam of these regimes and their like.

(C) – The third goal: Work to expose the weakness of America’s centralized power by pushing it to abandon the media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly. As a result, the apostates among all of the sects and groups and even Americans themselves will see that the remoteness of the primary center from the peripheries is a major factor contributing to the possible outbreak of chaos and savagery.

The first goal is coincident with that of the Transnationalists/Globalists: destroy respect for America.  The Transnational reasoning is as clear as that of al Qaeda.  Transnationalism is described by John Fonte in three good works:  The Ideological War within the West, Liberal Democracy vs Transnational Progressivism, and Transnationalist Left and Transnationalist Right.  Transnationalism is an emergent dogma that is a fusion of various leftist and radical movements starting with the Progressive movement in America and drawing its ideological bases from Communism, Fascism, Nazism, Democratic Socialism and Radicalism.  It is an anti-National distillation held by multiple organizations on how to remodel society from the view of an elite superstructure.  While those on the Transnational Left seek to do this for societal reasons, those on the Transnational Right seek to do that for economic reasons, and yet both utilize the same distillation of concepts, but with different emphasis.  Mr. Fonte describes the over-riding ideology, and thus a form of Grand Strategy, as follows:

Groups are what matter, not people. You are "Black" or "Christian" or "Mexican" or "Afghan" or "Sunni", you are not yourself. You also don't get to choose your group; it's inherent in what you were when you were born. Someone else will categorize you into your group, and you will become a number, a body to count to decide how important that group is. And your group won't change during your lifetime.

The goal of fairness is equality of result, not equality of opportunity. It isn't important to let individuals fulfill their potential and express their dreams, what's important is to make groups have power and representation in all things proportional to their numbers in the population. Fairness is for groups, not for individuals. The ideally fair system is based on quotas, not on merit, because that permits proper precise allocation of results.

Being a victim is politically significant. It's not merely a plea for help or something to be pitied; it's actually a status that grants extra political power. "Victimhood" isn't a cult, it's a valid political evaluation. Groups which are victims should be granted disproportionately more influence and representation, at the expense of the historic "dominant" culture.

Assimilation is evil. Immigrants must remain what they were before they arrived here, and should be treated that way. Our system must adapt to them, rather than expecting them to adapt to us (even if they want to). The migration of people across national borders is a way to ultimately erase the significance of those borders by diluting national identity in the destination country.

An ideal democracy is a coalition where political power is allocated among groups in proportion to their numbers. It has nothing to do with voting or with individual citizens expressing opinions, and in fact it doesn't require elections at all. A "winner take all" system, or one ruled by a majority, is profoundly repugnant because it disenfranchise minority groups of all kinds and deprives them of their proper share of power.

National identity is evil. We should try to think of ourselves as citizens of the world, not as citizens of the nations in which we live, and we should try to minimize the effects of national interests, especially our own if we live in powerful nations.

The al Qaeda vector goal of destroying respect for America plays into the Transnationalist vectors via group identification (Muslim vs. Non-Muslim), seeking 'fairness' (in which the demands of an 'oppressed group' trumps that of a Nation State), painting themselves as a 'victim', not only countering Nation State assimilation ideas but actively working towards separatist concepts, acting like a group that is 'disenfranchised' above and beyond being a 'victim', and espousing that religious identity trumps National identity.  Each of these themes play into the theme of destroying America.

What is interesting is that the second goal, of a renewal movement, is one to create a new elite structure for ruling that would be seen as the enemy of the cultural elite or economic elite in the Transnational Left and Right areas, respectively.  For all the oddities of the fantastical ideology of al Qaeda, they have taken a direct set of ideals from the Transnationalist perspective to create their own Transnationalist dogma that is backed by Terrorism.

Unexpectedly, to al Qaeda, is that in getting their third goal, they have damaged the first two very seriously as America actually has shown up to fight in Iraq, and very well, though perhaps not so well in Afghanistan.  This dogma was designed in the central asian environment and meant to play well in the general weak tribal environment of the Middle East and Africa.  There is one Nation in the Middle East that has very strong tribal affiliations, however, and has demonstrated resiliency against genocidal dictators:  Iraq.

As a strategic blunder, and this is in the Grand Strategy sense, al Qaeda has gambled and lost almost all of its three goals by investing so heavily in Iraq and not having it shift under to a normal State for the region.  This is due to the intense Nationalism that is felt North to South and East to West in Iraq: the New Iraqi Army was the first to clearly demonstrate this, but the gradual and strong return of civil society is now doubling and even trebling the error by al Qaeda.  Today Iraq arrests members of any group intent on harming the Nation, if they can find them, and the Tribes of Iraq, save for some holdouts, have turned against al Qaeda on the Sunni side and many of the Shia tribes want no affiliation with Iran.

 

Grand Strategic Failures of the Modern State

Grand Strategy actually requires that expected outcomes happen when you take activities, and al Qaeda has a non-intersection of outcomes to actions.  Where a Western ideology would implode due to this, al Qaeda's does not as it is not a rational nor logic based ideology:  it is a long-term conflict based on no surrender, no compromise and never giving up.  That is a fatalistic fantastic ideology and is the equivalent of a Death Cult.  As a rule, Death Cults only end once all their members have died or the entire organization so discredited that it cannot recover.  Aum Shinrikyo still exists, but is no longer the same organization it was, although there are still some deep followers of its ideology before its breakdown.  The Thugee following, a related type of cult of murder, was broken up due to its practices and heavily infiltrated until it could be, essentially, wiped out as a secret society.  These both point to a very active movement to rid society of these cults, and requires far more than just DIME exercising COIN.

At this point the negative conclusions draw a positive space of possibilities that are left. 

1. Transnationalism not only does not work against terrorism, it incites it and enables it as an anti-Nation State based concept.  It must be noted that not only is Transnational Terrorism of the al Qaeda or Islamic form one that utilizes the methodology of Western anti-Nationalists, it is also anti-Western and, therefore, inimical to the practitioners of Transnationalist Left and Right, in that it places those elites in a non-ruling, non-elite status, replaced by an Islamic selected elite class.  While all three operate in coincidence of method, they all differ on final status, which not only pits the two Western views against each other but also pits both of those against the Terrorist form.  Temporary coincidence of methodology does not point to coincidence of outcome.
   
2. Late 19th to 20th century Nationalism or Nation State doctrines have failed - This is apparent by the lack of coherence of the ethnic groups amongst the Nations that have formed: Pakistan, Afghanistan,Iran and the entire suite of ex-Soviet Central Asian Republics.  Pakistan by backing a number of these groups via its ISI (Hekmatyar, Meshud, Taliban, as examples) is a culprit in creating its own internal problems once these groups found stiff resistance in their target areas (Kasmir, Aghanistan, Iran) and started working with some of the criminal enterprises that arose after the fall of the USSR (notably Semion Mogilevich's trade group but also such individuals as the arms smuggler Viktor Bout).  The Pashtun people had an edict imposed on them during the British Empire to wait along 'temporary' borders while everyone figured out what was what, and that was going to last 100 years.  The 100 years ran out a few decades ago.  That, together with the Baluchs, who feel they got cheated out of significant internal sovereignty, plus other ethnic and religious groups and personal armies (or Lashkars) have made the modern Nation State a near impossibility to keep together.  The list of governments, assassinations, terror organizations, bombings, and personal armies running around since the stand-up of Pakistan, alone, indicates a failure of a coherent modern State system.
   
3. Communism and Socialism have not addressed these problems - Both have been tried since the stand-up of Pakistan, neither has addressed the problem.  Nor has capitalism, although it is a thriving concept amongst the tribes.  Lawless areas continued to remain lawless no matter what the ideology of the government.
   
4. Afghanistan has thrown off all exterior repression and now works hard to keep interior types in check - That is semi-workable, but so long as it has strong ethnic ties to a lawless region of Pakistan that allows private armies there will be no end of trouble.  A larger war or expanded war will NOT cure this problem and only expand the conflict if internal governments collapse in any Nation having some ethnic contact with those involved in the conflict.  Afghanistan can only be considered to have meta-stability, or being stable until a vector of events turns it unstable, and those would be ethnic or tribal level, not necessarily Nation State level.
   
5. Appeasement does not work - The lawless areas fully intend to remain so and use 'cease-fires' as times to upgrade their capabilities (in negation of the cease-fire as the term is understood in military parlance).  Thus offers for such are disingenuous.  And, as non-State actors are involved, they cannot have any treaty power externally or internally, as anyone who disagreed would feel free to continue on as they were doing and ignore such treaties.

That is a highly sobering assessment as it invalidates all modern thinking on Nation States, Transnationalism and Globalism.  That is not something that the current political set up of the Western Nation State system is ready to adjust to and has failed at as that is the source of the problem.   What is necessary is to then see what the hallmarks of the solution space contain.

 

One Possible Solution Space

If the modern conceptions of Nation State and Transnationalism fail, then their failure creates the possible areas that are within a successful bounds for not only Pakistan but Central Asia as a whole.  The negatives are ones that must be known, otherwise a reliance with concepts and references to these modern types and incorporation of them will not come a solution that is viable.  This requires that thinking in modernistic terms of economy, society and warfare must all be scaled back to more basic and essential types for each category and then advanced slowly until the non-concordance with existing societies and types happens.  Solution space analysis begins with delimited areas and then scales to the minimum necessary to meet localized needs and still accord a higher level structure that has the least intrusion on those needs.  Thus the modern, centralized political systems of the West are not useful analogs for the solution space, as they engender too much centralized power that is in non-accordance with decentralized society.

While many of these solution types are pre-existing and known, their implementation in a post-industrial world is not out of accord with the general pre-industrial environment of society, culture and ethnicity seen in Central Asia.  Modern communications and other systems can help these systems along, but they are not central to the operations of the systems in the solution space.

First, the solution space has within it the pre-modern, pre-19th century conception of the Nation State.  This is not a prerequisite, by any means, but it offers a number of things that the late-19th and 20th century lacks:

• Pluralism - Instead of multi-ethnic approaches of the modern type, the pre-modern ones of pluralism based on ethnic identity but holding to common necessities for basic societal structure and governance offers flexibility and adaptability without the need for lock-step conformity as seen in modern multi-ethnic societies.  Modern multi-ethnic concepts have shied away from such concepts as Federalism or Confederalism and concentrate on a centralized State apparatus.  As it is the centralized State concept that has repeatedly failed in the region, the more loosely held but still constrained Federal or Confederal conception of Nation State remains one area that no one has tried: the internal self-checking, self-balancing arrangement between unequal groups with equality of checks so that no major group dominates and puts the rights of smaller groups at risk.
  
• Westphalianism - This is the generalized concept of the Nation State that can have a religious basis, but has internal agreement that this cannot be used to press a religious doctrine downwards from the State level.  An Islamic State that agreed to an internal Westphalian system of governance would have a generalized Islamic outlook, but only for those things held in absolute common across all sects within the State and then could impress none of those, save for minor things like holidays, upon any sect.  The West has generalized that to all religions, but a more restricted concept of 'known religions in society' was the prevailing ones before late 18th century Nation State doctrine came into being.
  
• Internal trade regularization - In either the Federal or Confederal systems in a Pluralistic arrangement, autonomous or semi-autonomous sub-National States or Provinces agree to common rules for general trade and practices internally and to have external trade practices regulated by a common agreement government.  This does require normalization of National boundaries, but that can be done via understood treaty arrangements to take into account Pluralistic needs for travel (kinship relationships, religious practices, etc.).  Practices outside the purview of the Nation State and reserved for Individuals and sub-National States or Provinces then allow for specificity of trade agreements for those groups that are amenable to the larger Pluralistic system without endorsing favoritism.
  
• Codification of private armies - This is something that is not well understood, but serves as a basis for the Nation State control of armed forces.  Private Armies would need to operate under National regulations and guidelines and hold themselves accountable to that structure.  This does not mean a National Army, per se, but having identified command and control structures run by individuals or groups and adhering to the larger National agreements amongst various groups.  The concept of this is a 'well regulated militia' in which service in these private groups comes under National oversight while not endangering the ability of private organizations at the local level to self-organize.  Indeed, they become National level tools via such regularized concepts of the Letters of Marque and Reprisal if the Nation decides to have no standing armed forces.  A larger agreement to come to the aid of any sub-member who is attacked by an outside force is a general requirement here, as well as serving as an adjunct to a National standing force if such is created.  Trust in such a government is paramount for having such forces and regularizing them, and such governments know that they are held accountable for their actions and that civil, political means are preferable to military means.
  
• Nation State supported armed forces - These forces are seen as the common defense of all sub-groups and sub-States or Provinces within such an arrangement.  Here some check and balance agreement between the sub-units of society is necessary, and one that puts such armed forces as permissible when larger than the largest of the sub-state groups Militia but no larger than the largest three, say, is workable.  That gives the State a necessary leeway to create a competent military system for regularized defense of the Nation and yet is held in harsh check by the three largest sub-unit Militias due to size.  A practical note is that the sub-units may realize that weakening their sizes also draws down the maximum size of the National forces and some minimal size of the National force may be set by common agreement.  Here 'size' may be in manpower, funding or both combined.

Combined these bear the hallmarks of the restricted space as delimited by the negatives: each part of this sort of solution is within the positive space while not incorporating the negative space.  Such an outlook places cultural and ethnic affinity as a high priority for a Nation and yet recognizes that common understanding across all sub-States or Provinces is a requirement for the good of all.  What such a thing would do in Pakistan is cause a major re-negotiation of the basis for the State, itself and a buy-in by all the major ethnic and religious regions and perhaps some re-drawing of internal boundaries.  An attempt to redress the grievances of Baluchs and Pashtuns, in particular, is a requirement of such a solution and yet no final outcomes can be dictated by an external Nation or set of Nations, even though some grievances will require external redress (Baluchs with Iran, Kasmir settlement and Pashtuns with Afghanistan amongst many).  The original basis for Pakistan left the major sub-populations of Pashtuns and Baluchs feeling slighted to the point of becoming international threats, and no modern conformation of the Pakistani State has brought these regions into alignment with it.

 

Modern US governmental changes via politics

This brings this analysis to the modern two party system and trenchant ideologies of the United States.  The post-Cold War stasis in which one party held majorities in the House and Senate for 40 years started to dissolve in the 1980's and by the 1990's the Cold War stasis had left a group of individuals unready for the modern world, unwilling to address it and unable to conceive of how to deal with it absent a global threat.  These individuals had so infiltrated the political system with their adherents that the system, itself, was regulated to one in which only two parties get any chance to compete in a meaningful way at all scales of National debate.  The expansive concentration of power that started with President Theodore Roosevelt had continued unabated no matter which party was in office or governmental control: both had sought to use new powers taken without any other recourse to their own ideological ends.  The same political class that put a static system of Foreign Policy and Military Policy in place still have no other antidote to the problems it has caused and even refuse to recognize the two party causation of these problems.

The Republican Party has been notable in that it started off the entire Progressive cycle of government with the Administration of Theodore Roosevelt.  Until that point in time the Progressives aligned with the Populists to push general long-term themes to 'modernize government' via Constitutional amendments.  President Theodore Roosevelt would abet this from the Executive Branch by shifting to accede to the wishes of a religious majority that sought an end to the opium trade in China.  The accords reached in Shanghai would require those governments that signed on to it to end the opium trade in their countries.  As a signatory the US would have to break with Constitutional limitation on the federal government and seek the first ever restriction on personal use of medicines.  Prior to that the use of such things as laudanum, cocaine and heroin were required under the food and drug purity act which would establish that contents of foods and medications needed to be listed.  That, alone, started to curb rampant drug use.  Those who sought moral backing via an overseas treaty looked to enforce a 'good' by statute to enforce a treaty, thus criminalizing the unregulated use of medications for the first time, ever, in federal history.  Although that legislation would be put in during another Administration, it was President Theodore Roosevelt's that sought to expand the latitude of federal power beyond its traditional and understood boundaries.

Those powers accumulated to the Office of the Executive and to the federal government, and in a ten year period there would be a radical shift of the basis of US government away from classical liberty to that of Progressive government.  The more Populist based Democratic Party would latch onto these powers and help to get the necessary Amendments passed to change that basis and then start to implement greater and deeper shifts of power distribution to the federal government throughout the rest of the 20th century.  Holding the Congressional majority for 40 years helped to ensure that there would be no questioning of these changes and that no ending statutes for new government entities would ever be put in place.  In the prior century government institutions that were not direct Constitutional charters often had re-upping limits on them, such as the First National Bank, so that future Congresses and Presidents would be able to review and change or abolish these new government organs.  In 1832 the Democratic President Andrew Jackson ended the First National Bank and similar powers would not exist until the founding of the Federal Reserve by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson.  In that span of 80 years the Democratic Party went from support of classical liberal values to ones of government invested power over the citizenry, which is perhaps the greatest turnaround for any political party ever witnessed in the United States.

During the 20th century, American politics would adjust to the end of Imperial courts and Europe and the United States passing multiple European Nations in industrial output and power, as well as inventiveness in many technical fields.  The rise of mighty Nation States would also cause a general forgetfulness that warfare is not delimited to the Nation State, and that the Law of Nature that is given to all men allows for Private War.  For those years in which Nations held the overwhelming sway of power, such things as piracy and rogue armies tended to be overlooked, although the Soviet Union would stage the first ever paratroop drop against a rogue army as late as 1929.  The older Hague Conventions and pre-existing other conventions prior to the late 19th century Hague Conventions, understood Private War in the realm of Piracy and President Lincoln understood it to the point of authorizing the Army Field Manual-101 in 1863 that specified that acts the modern world would call 'terrorism' when seen by armies is to be treated summarily as Piracy or highway robbery.  It was this basic understanding that both parties, and the world as a whole, would slowly forget as two world wars and a massive cold war embroiled the governments of the planet during the 20th century.  With that forgetting would also go the means to counter them and the memory of why certain parts of the Constitution are set up as they are.  If the Constitution becomes a 'living document' then the memory system of it is distorted via re-interpretation by actual, living people.  At some point the basic structure is changed via 'reinterpretation' until the actual meanings and understandings of what Constitutions do for Nations is forgotten.

 

Foreign and Military Policy results

President Theodore Roosevelt is one of the first Presidents to call for an omnibus international body and also one of the first to repudiate the idea once he actually experienced how international bodies worked.  This ideal would be picked up by the Democrats and Woodrow Wilson, and soon add 'modern' international institutions that had previously not existed.  At that point this strain of Wilsonian Politics in America was one that would serve as the founding for Transnationalism.  America, save for a few years under President McKinley and early on with President Theodore Roosevelt, would not practice 19th century foreign or military policy.  While many point to this as a great 'good', being anti-imperialist in stance, the less understood problem with it is that it creates weak or unaccountable international institutions that are powerless without Nation State backing by a majority of powerful Nation States.  Instead of being 'anti-imperialist' this is system that, in theory, empowers large nations (either economically or via population) to force things their way when it helps them and to ignore anything that is not in their interest.

No Nation has tied its Military Policy to either the League of Nations or the United Nations for this reason: the large powers utilize these institutions to suit their ends, and when a Nation does not do that, it is liable to suffer at the hands of tyrannical or despotic Nations that form the majority of small Nations on the planet.  With Authoritarian, Totalitarian or Tyrannical large powers, and there need not be more than a simple moderate plurality in population or economic size, the ability of such bodies to bring about coherent action is negated.  Even in areas of Foreign Policy, no Nation dares trying to utilize such means as the only way to act as it means restricting their Nation and no longer utilizing the wide leeway any Nation has on direct, one-to-one talks as with traditional treaties.  Finally these large bodies become bureaucratic nightmares, being large institutions with no oversight, the ability of bad actors to find a home and be able to protect themselves from being dislodged by the use of diplomatic credentials is high.  None dare give power to such a body as it is the definition of despotic to start with, and swayed by the hot feelings of small Nations that do not have large economies or populations.

From this the United States learned Isolationism, utilizing the maxims of President Washington and distrusting foreign alliances.  Isolation did not start nor fuel the beginnings of the First or Second World Wars: the first was out of the capability of the US to influence and the second started in places like China and would then pick up years later in Europe.  No one had the power or will to stop Imperial Japan in China, and by the time people began to worry about Italian ventures into Ethiopia, the European system of Nations was succumbing to National Socialism.  No other Nation could reasonably expect to intervene militarily against Japan, Italy or Germany, and by the time any realized that they must do so, the world was at war.

International Socialism arising from the Communist regime in the Soviet Union would start the second basis for expanding Transnationalism and give Wilsonianism a Red make-over and then utilize the combination after the Second World War to start an anti-capitalist system of thought that would coalesce in the 1960's with US radicalism melded with European Socialism and other Radicals in Europe.  By the 1970's Transnationalism would take on some of the trappings of Globalist Capitalism and the latter would take on some of the virulence against Nation State power of the Transnationalists.  Because neither of these had any coherent foundation, they grew as a hodge-podge of general concepts that only coalesced around some basic points, yet by the late 1990's and early years of 2001-2003 those points would be able to be summarized by John Fonte as a coherent belief structure that covered almost all the radical/communist/socialist/globalist concepts that appear as many separate faces, but all are all different parts of the same working ideology.

Foreign Policy would shift to try and accommodate these changes and that would negatively influence US military policy in Vietnam.  What started as a simple support for a mostly democratic State against International Communism would become the first conflict to utilize Transnational Progressivist themes against the United States.  The military policy that started out as a simple enaction of the early Foreign Policy would be betrayed by the change in Foreign Policy and Domestic Policy that would squander all major positives of the COIN work that was done and actually lose the war for the United States.  That shift would disenchant many with the armed forces, as it was intended to do, but leave the core Nation State policy backers in charge.  The all-volunteer force would rebuild with a different ethos and understanding of how US policies shift in obtuse ways and attempt to prepare the armed forces for a similar happening a second time.

Foreign policy would further be twisted by Transnationalists and Globalists, to back the anti-American organizations of the UN and to try and back 'humanitarian' missions for US forces where the Nation had no legitimate reason to intervene.  President Reagan would be the first to attempt this in Lebanon, and the death of the US Marines and their French Comrades on a mission of peace would ultimately see a non-response by the US that would begin the super-charging of non-State actors following the behest of Iran which had become a radical Islamic State during President Carter's term in office.  The idea that was used was one that was bankrupt:  Realism in Foreign Policy.  What would be even worse is that over the decades of the post-World War II era, the education system of the United States would no longer teach the basics of military policy with regards to conflicts, until a general ignorance of what post-war situations actually look like when there are NO global conflicts involved would be the NORM for the United States.

Thus no policy was set up to counter non-State actors.  Post-Imperialism was a major causative factor to the start of them, not a way of curbing them.  Realism ignored them.  Globalism used them as an extortionary threat, at best, and at worse paid no attention to them.  Transnationalism so inculcated its concepts that they have been hijacked by terrorists to the point where terrorism now represents a methodology to create a separate elite from both the Transnational Progressivists and the Global Capitalists.  And no post-Cold War doctrine ever arose to cover them in a methodological and definitional way.  This is not limited to the Capitalist West but also to the Communist and Socialist regimes stretching throughout Europe and into the now defunct USSR.

 

Current Politics

The multi-variate 'Bush Doctrine' has undergone at least four major changes from its early isolationism prior to 9/11 to an anti-terrorist stance between 9/11 and the run-up to Iraq, then to a multilateral stance with regards to North Korea and finally to a traditional Globalist/Transnational Right concept seen during the term of President Bush (41).  It stepped close to actually being able to define terrorism in the modern world, but lacked vision, clarity and understanding of what terrorism actually *is* to call it by name and deal with it.

The Clinton Foreign Policy, it cannot be called a 'Doctrine', was one of political opportunism trying to show a glad hand for the least expenditure of National political capital possible.  It not only did not counter Transnational Terrorism, but it emboldened it via flaccid or non-responses to attacks in:  Langley, VA; WTC bombing; attacks in Somalia funded by al Qaeda; Kenya and Tanzania Embassy bombings; minimal action against FARC as it sought to take over the Colombian drug trade that would result only in a longer term COIN concept near the end of the Administration; and no response to an attack by al Qaeda that by all definitions would be called 'piracy' at any other point in US history.  Further, political capital was expended to no firm end in the Balkans (where the Kosovars love the US and the Serbs have come to detest the US), Haiti (with yet another President not doing anything substantial for the Nation following in the miserable experience of FDR there),and not doing a thing about genocide in Rwanda or Iraq.  On the latter score it allowed hundreds of thousands that had been executed for daring to believe the US would keep its word if they tried to over throw Saddam Hussein that they would get support.  Instead they got no support and seriously dead.  Both of the parties and its candidates have extreme problems of setting up any coherent Foreign Policy as they all rely upon failed past policies that have never addressed the post-Cold War era in regards to Transnational Terrorism, International Organized Crime and the diminution of Nation State power to unauthorized, unaccountable international concerns.

The Democratic Party has no coherent Foreign Policy and a degenerative Military Policy to further weaken the armed forces and put multiple necessary upgrades on 'hold'.  As was seen under other Democratic and Republican Congresses, the ability to maintain the Armed Forces is placed at a minimal stance without a 'hot conflict' going on.  If Afghanistan goes 'hot' under an Obama Administration, it will mean the involvement of one of the three nuclear powers in the region (China, India, or Pakistan) and a 'crisis' to show 'strength' without having any clear idea of what end-state such an Administration is looking for.  A withdrawal from Iraq before its major military infrastructure is in place (circa 2016) would leave critical and foundational gaps in that very successful conflict and squander a US victory there and put the risk of deep turmoil back into the Middle East.  By stabilizing the geographic centroid of the Middle East, the entire region is undergoing a period of increasing quiescence as it tries to absorb just what kind of Nation Iraq is.  As any external Nation faces danger in not figuring that out, first, only Iran is bold and blinkered enough to think that causing trouble there will help them.  Iran, itself, is undergoing an oil production crisis due to not keeping up its infrastructure, and is now faced with external criminal pressure from the Red Mafia that controls a vital 5% of the natural gas that Iran uses.  On understanding world events and terrorism, the Democratic Party as a whole only has Transnationalist and anti-US platitudes to hand out.

The Republican Party is shifting to a minimal Globalist concept to attempt to assuage those who feel the diminution of National Sovereignty due to previous Globalist trends put in place by the minimally Transnationalist Clinton Administration and by the Globalist outlooks of President Bush (41).  The current Bush Administration's trends have been towards those of moderately more Globalism and loosening controls on US domestic affairs in the economic realm to Transnationalist outlooks backed by Globalist finances.  The economic problems currently seen are directly traceable to the Transnationalist work done by the Carter Administration and not curbed by any subsequent Administration and enhanced by multiple Congresses of both Parties.  While there is some understanding of trade necessities for economic growth, there are none in place for accountability by those who trade with us who do NOT actively go after terrorists and who may actually give safe haven and support to various networks of terrorists.  The support of anti-Nationalist trends via Globalism is not one that spells out either prosperity or safety for the United States, and yet is happily at home in the Republican Party.  While the Republican Party generally supports a somewhat coherent Military Policy, their Party was responsible for the failure of support and funding for the armed forces throughout the mid-to-late 1990's and two entire Army Divisions falling to their lowest readiness since Vietnam as Congressional Republicans would not do their duty as Congressmen and hold the President accountable for the use of the armed forces without Congressional authorization.

What is even worse is that faced with a growing threat of Mexico imploding on the southern border due to the melding of Transnational Terrorism and International Organized Crime, neither of them is prepared to address the issue in a substantive way.  Both parties have been influenced by the strains of Transnationalism and Globalism to disregard Nation State boundaries and that puts the infiltration of external criminal organizations and terror organizations into the US as a known minimum number of events and an unrecorded number that goes unchecked without border enforcement.  Both Transnationalism and Globalism are fanning the fires in which very rich Red Mafia oligarchs can invest in financed organized crime with an aim towards the natural resource wealth of Mexico and the ultimate consumer of much of it to the North.  This puts both parties in a tenuous position to address any problems in Mexico and the resultant spill-over in the lead up to them going unchecked.

 

Conclusion

The lack of coherent understanding of ethnic problems in Central Asia is a result, not a cause, of US inability to respond to many other problems on a larger basis.  In attempting to do group analysis with a Transnationalist or Globalist bent, and then using restricted modern concepts of Nation States and International Policy, the US is unable to show adaptability with what should be the most adaptable system of society and government ever developed by mankind.  The Globalist and Transnationalist views that are anti-Nationalist, anti-democratic and anti-classical liberal in views has so eroded the ability of the political elite in America to understand what is happening in the world that this very same elite is floundering and threatening not only the stability of the United States but also that of the entire global system of trade, finance and commerce that have made for global population stability to occur.  Without those systems or with an actual 'hot' nuclear war starting in Central Asia, the world would be faced with the collapse of the global trade system and the discrediting of both Globalism and Transnationalism as failures to actually address the small scale needs of ethnic groups.

The coarse tooth comb of modern political ignorance is faced with a very fine-tooth problem and cannot adapt nor adjust to these changed circumstances.  It is not a new problem and has many other areas where similar factors show up:  the Balkans, Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa to name but a few regions with very similar and very volatile merging of the problems of the inability of the Western World to understand such things as personal liberty and accountability to society.  International institutions have proven not only unable to deal with these things but actually make matters worse by inflaming local hatreds and then not protecting those they are supposed to protect.

Anything that upsets the global trade system, however, has at stake not just local Nation State problems but those of global interdependence for such things as food shipments.  The US, as a main purveyor of many vital foodstuffs, serves as a major backbone to keep much of the world's population out of starvation, and yet the US is also unable to deal in any meaningful way with local ethnic problems or to confront trends that threaten this very same life support system.

Defuzing the possibility of a 'hot' nuclear war in Central Asia requires a change in political will and understanding to that of the earlier part of the Republic, and no political party is willing to give up 'modern' centralized and powerful governments for decentralized and yet accountable people taking up the fine-grained work that the 'modern' state is so woefully inadequate and incapable of responding to.  Unable to think about such things either from ignorance or ideological blindness by following pat platitudes, the political elite class is now acting contrary to long-term survival interests of the Nation and to the overall population of the planet as a whole.  And yet that is just what is at stake as the US has proven unable to adapt its Foreign Policy to such needs, and yet has all the vital tools at hand if it could just let go of power in its grasp.  That very Fascist 'will to power' and belief that government can solve all ills, puts the blunt instrument of government smack dab against the fine grained institutions of individuals forming societies of a relatively unsophisticated form.  And yet by taking up that unsophisticated form, it stymies all modern pre-conceptions about society, Nations and government.  Because of that the US is now facing the specter of a Cold Civil War that has the prospect of going 'hot' the moment a COIN conflict starts in Mexico or Pakistan hits the pot and disintegrates.

This status quo will not last much longer as there are too many and too many varied interests seeking to push the vectors involved in ways that are inimical to the US and its allies.

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A sad goodbye

RIP Beloved Garibaldi

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We are all plumbers now

Joe Wurzelbacher had the temerity to believe that if you are playing catch football on the front lawn of your home and a politician comes up and asks if you have a question for him, that you can, indeed, ask him a question and maybe, with some luck, get an answer.

He did.  Here is the YouTube capture of that on Fox News:

And now the political Left is out for blood, going after Joe The Plumber.

In 24 hours we get more investigation of Joe The Plumber, than we have gotten in 24 months on Sen. Barack Obama.  Indeed, the rabid attack on him, his personal affairs and his actual plumbitorial status have been called into question.  This is a guy working for a company doing plumbing work, who is middle class, at best, not seeking political limelight and figured that it was a free country in which the common man, when asked by a politician who is also a citizen if he wanted to ask a question, that he could do so and get an answer.  He probably expected what he ALWAYS gets from politicians: "I will get back to you on that."

If there was any surprise it was Sen. Obama deciding to give an ANSWER.

Yes, as soon as a politician on the Left says anything about wanting to 'spread the wealth around' via increasing taxes and meets up with someone who will be HURT by that, well, the ability to become unhinged is quite astounding.  First there was this strange idea that someone Sen. Obama approached might be a 'plant'!  Unfortunately, as I've looked at before, such plants live better in the hothouse of a debate audience, not out on the street where all sorts of foreign things can get to their leaves, roots and infest their limited shade. 

Then comes the 'he isn't a plumber' by some definition of a local council and possible Union backing.  Of course his business that he WORKS FOR has to certify his work and he is a JOURNEYMAN who is seeking to get his license and one of those must LEARN his trade under a more experienced individual.  But beyond that, and really taking the cake, are those on the left who think that certification in a profession means someone actually DOES A GOOD JOB.

Ok, I grew up in the environs of Buffalo in one of its better suburbs, which put me about a mile from the city line and in what the rest of America would call 'lower middle class'.  My relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins, and a large number of their friends were what we would call 'blue collar working class' or even 'working poor'.  Strange that they did not seem to be 'oppressed by the system' and led good lives working a wide range of jobs in: knitting factories for conveyor belts, food distribution warehouses, construction work, long-haul trucking, tool and die making and mechanical product finishing, compressor construction, food services industry... friends of the family worked in similar jobs in precision metalworking, surveying, metal casting, carpentry, electricians, and, yes, plumbing.  In my family, my father was in the lower echelons of electrical engineering for large motors and I had a cousin working for a huge aluminum conglomerate in the smelting operations control sector.  Other jobs taken by family members, including myself, included cafeteria management, clearing warehouses (you can't really call it cleaning them), secretarial work for a small business in school supply, putting up pools, checking finance drafts against payouts for banks, and a wide range of other things.  My post just previous to this looks at the DIY spirit in which everyone had the basics of knowing that if you couldn't find the exact right person to do something yourself, your friends and family members could find one for you.  And if worse came to worse, you could, indeed, DIY with some help of a friend or two.

I have some news for the elitists who think you need a certification to do plumbing work: that would be news to my father who did that in the home and understood its principles and how to properly solder seal a fixture.  Worked, too.  And if you needed something major done, you basically went the Friend-Of-A-Friend route and found someone who did good work, was reliable and charged decently.  Even if it *was* under the table, you did not give a good, hot damn for paying off bureaucrats when what you needed was good work at a reasonable price.  I've met a person or two who *never* seek to leave the 'journeyman' status as they have a good and portable skill without any overhead that can allow them to quickly move from company to company when times are rough.  If you do that for 20 years you probably have someone who is better than any certified master of the trade.

When these people want to strike out on their own and form a small business, they seek backers amongst their friends and family, who know they do good work and know how to manage themselves in many different situations.  They will do the base minimal amount to get the check boxes checked without wanting a high cost bureaucratic overhead,and so they form up garages, small shops, appliance repair stores, plumbing concerns, electricians businesses, and on and on and on.  Each and every damned tax aimed at the 'rich' seems to end up hitting these people squarely in the stomach, and their businesses SUFFER because of high minded people wanting to 'spread the wealth around'.

I've got a newsflash: they ARE spreading the wealth around by HIRING people to do GOOD WORK and PAY THEM.

Pay them a damned sight more than welfare or minimum wage, too.  I've personally seen small businesses where the OWNER is NOT the highest paid individual because that owner of the business values good people with good work reliability, high skills and the ability to GET JOBS DONE.  Scary, isn't that?  An owner of a business not creaming off the top and being the highest paid individual in the company?  Tells you something about how much they value good work and a damned good work ethic, and deny themselves so that those they hire can make a good wage and feed their families.  They do that because they are dedicated to their business, not making a buck for themselves. 

When you tell *that* class of business owners that they need to 'spread the wealth around', then you have just handed out the worst possible insult to them that you can imagine.  And you are also insulting their workforce, even if it is under 10 people, who KNOW that is how that owner operates and dedicate themselves to doing good work to show that they earn their pay and actually deserve it.

I know this from the best experience possible: seeing it in action during the first 25 years of my life growing up as I did in the family I did.

I frequented businesses and garages where the owner and three other guys did FANTASTIC WORK at a DECENT PRICE and would regularly come in UNDER their cost estimates.  I've been to the family run hardware stores looking for nearly impossible to find parts and having someone rummage around for it, find it, and then sell it to me at markup on the original cost... and if the part had been sitting there for 20 years, I got a BARGAIN.  I've been to auto wrecking yards looking for small parts and coming in with a tray of same and the owner looking at me and saying 'take it, no one ever bothers with that stuff' and I was willing to pay upwards of $50 bucks for stuff I had to dig around and find myself.  He wouldn't hear of it.  He got himself a loyal customer, who found this man through his OTHER customers, many of which were the shops I used.

Do I know guys like Joe The Plumber in my life?

Hell YES.

I never, in my life, expected to see a politician or his adoring followers EVER attempt to demean someone like Joe The Plumber.  These are the working stiff backbone of our society that keeps it working well on a friendly basis and you cannot enforce friendliness upon them from on high.  I've even known racists and bigots who would STILL do work contrary to their outlook and do it WELL because, hey, 'a buck's a buck, a customer's a customer, you know?'  Somehow the color of money and doing a good job would OVERRIDE those things.  That is not to say that all such will do that, but it is interesting to note that for all the 'racial problems' I hear of in America, no one addresses the fact that the GOD DAMNED WORK STILL GETS DONE BY SOMEONE.

As my Uncle Ed used to do when hearing 'how bad things were', he would look out the window and say:

"It can't be that bad.  No bodies in the streets."

His younger brothers fought in World War II and they survived the Great Depression, so he just might have had something there.

As for Joe, he wanted to see if he could get a LOAN to buy a business to run it: he did not earn over $250,000, he was going to have to borrow it.  And even if he did that he did not expect to change his living circumstances as he knew that running a business left him little for himself in the way of pay.

And he is excoriated over a tax lien?  And Sen. Obama's Treasurer ISN'T?

Joe The Plumber might be some distant relation to Charles Keating and yet Sen. Obama hobnobbing with a multi-billionaire involved in the Oil For Food scandal, Tony Rezko and a contract in Iraq that saw a man prosecuted there and now in Chicago supporting Sen. Obama ISN'T IMPORTANT?

Excuse me?

That is over-the-top hypocrisy of the first order by all those looking at Joe Wurzelbacher and trying to run him down.

Particularly if his own BOSS lied to him about the status of the company and how work is done.

And, yeah, I've seen that happen too.  Cutting bureaucratic corners to make a living, and then having a load of bricks dropped on you for doing that.  Believe it or not, sometimes that happens to good companies who are trying to obey the law and can't keep up with every freaking change done by politicians at the behest of labor unions, regulators and bureaucrats.  Each of which makes it more expensive to have a small business... big businesses can absorb that cost and pass it along as a minor increment in cost. 

Small businesses CAN'T.

What do you call it when government regulations reward large businesses by removing the competitive ability of small ones, and then dictating how the large businesses will be run?

It has a word in the political lexicon attached to it.

Fascism.

Those who support big government and 'spreading the wealth around' via it?

Fascists.

What does mandating 'good behavior' and punishing those that do not have the same political view require?

A Totalitarian State.

Yeah, kinda apparent by the way the Left is reacting.  Apparently they also forget that such States tend to 'eat their own young' and supporters at a horrific rate.  No matter how nice the State, the greatest threat to it are those who brought it into power...

Because we are all starting to look like plumbers to the Elite.

Good luck on the stopped up drains.

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The cheapskate pays the most...usually

I've had what Jeff Goldstein would call "A Moment of Unabashed Pragmatism".

Here's the deal, coming from low-end middle American background and growing up in an old industrial environment (although the suburbs of same, to be admitted) I got used to this strange thing known as:  Do It Yourself.

The DIY culture is astounding, today, in that so many people don't realize what they can actually do if they apply themselves to it.  That is why there are all those lovely programs on people doing things to each other's homes and so many of the good reality programs that just show normal, everyday folks doing their jobs.  Really, I do like many of those as seeing good, hard working people at the top of their jobs is a great insight into just how well any of us can do such things.  Even better is you get this strange idea that you can, indeed, do it yourself.

So with that background, I never felt out of place tackling the odd-jobs of home and car maintenance, and took that into my own DIY computer systems (from components) and all sorts of other fun things.  My Pico-ITX build (slowly coming together) is one such area, in which I have all the necessary background to do the build, just not the materials or tools.  Thus, having done all sorts of other manual tasks and observed, closely, thousands more as I grew up, I could scope out the broad outlines of a job and then know all it took was:  time, effort, having the right tools, and getting the right parts.

The first I have boodles of!  Good!

Not being well the second is limited to only a few hours a day, as in less than 5 and usually less than 3.  Not good, but it can be worked around.

Tools... bare essentials with a couple of those missing, but most for the types of things I need to handle.

Parts.  Depends on what I'm doing, usually I can depend upon my self-reliant hunting ability on the net to get parts... if they are made.

Stepping from the Pico ITX build (And much thanks to Beto Ocho on the screw suggestion for the case!  2/56 UNC is what the doctor ordered!) leads me into the strange area of 'retail packaging'.

Here's the deal: for small amounts of good material you usually pay through the nose for it.  Now, not to beat on anyone in particular, but to use as an example, there is the Militec 1 'synthetic metal conditioner'.  Now heading over to their retail section I find 3 of the 0.5 oz bottles for $10.95 (delivered), or $7.95/oz. 

At 1oz. they drop it to $7.90/oz. 

At 4oz it goes for $18.90 or $4.725/oz.

At 8oz it goes for $26.90 or $3.3625/oz.

At 16oz it goes for $39.90 or $2.49375/oz.

As the packaging size goes up, the cost per ounce goes down, which demonstrates that it is a pain to package stuff into smaller quantities and track them, etc.  So, I am a cheapskate and went to Impact Guns and their Militec 1 sales area and see the 16 oz. bottle goes for $29.99 and shipping and handling still brought it under the price from the supplier.  Well, that is normal supply chain and originator pricing at MSRP so that their retailers can look like they are saving you cash.  Which, they are.  Now, 16 oz. is a bit unwieldy and a bit much for me, so the 8 oz did look better for personal needs, but even with the tip on the thing it isn't what I would call 'small'.  Which means I would really like a small tip applicator, preferably in squeeze bottle form.

Now, as you can guess the same goes for the Militec 1 grease and I found a great deal at Brownell's for the 14 oz. tube of the stuff for $8.  I didn't see their case costs for the other stuff as worthwhile, however.  And, if I wanted the grease at a good price, I would also need something to apply it with.

This now takes me to retail use of bulk consumables.

Coming at life from the natural sciences, I got used to beakers, squeeze bottles, flasks, etc. at a pretty young age: our school system really pressed that stuff down all the way to the 8th grade and made sure it stuck.  I'm used to the stuff.  So along with light industrial, electronics, home repair, auto maintenance, I now add in the entire scientific realm of hands-on chemistry up to the college level and geology at the college level.  And it is DIY land for those.

Knowing that something is made, exists and can be had at a price, I then reversed the process and looked for the applicators in a low cost arena.  If I'm going to get a decent price on something, I want it to be useful!  This then took me to the plastics industry and there are more of these suppliers than I care to name, but I will name the one I settled on: HMC Electronics.

An electronics store for plastic goods?

Well yes, dear heart, they are related to each other, especially in the materials creation, measuring and use areas.  Depending on the area of scientific endeavor you will need electronic equipment, like scales, to do your work.  If you need to wash excess *gunk* off a circuit board with a stable cleaner, you need a small bottle to do that.  If you collect specimens for scientific reasons, you want clean, sterile plastic goods for that.  And if you are into needing glues, adhesives, greases, oils, acids, bases, and other things that come in liquids, gels, suspended colloids and such things, then you will be buying in bulk and packaging it for yourself into smaller quantities....

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

I grew up in Buffalo.

Thus at HMC Electronics they have the Packaging area which has Dispensing Bottles & Applicators.  Syringes (Industrial) for grease!  Yes you can get one, precise, dot of grease that way without having to get a nasty metal tip... which I avoid for various reasons of chemistry, heat, static electricity and being unable to cut those down to get a wider applicator.  And a leakproof oiler bottle!  Heaven!  My general rule is: if one shop has it all for decent prices, save on shipping and handling and get it all from them.  Now I also have other gun maintenance fluids (solvents, conditioners, etc.) that would be much nicer in a more compact and easier to carry form... so a few bags of the 2 oz. bottles and a leakproof oiler and some of those lovely 30cc syringes for the grease.

That left one thing, which I could get for a song in an old industrial area, but is damned hard to come by in suburbia in northern VA: a grease gun.  Literally, in Buffalo I could think of at least three places to go to get one used for a couple of bucks.  I could do a 'quick and dirty' on the plunger, degrease it with a bit of gasoline and it would be ready to go.  No dice here, when you are basically stuck at home, and the internet, for all of its wonderful things, doesn't yield up used automotive or industrial equipment like that too readily.  So, new, from Amazon, lowest I could find... ADT-5000 I think it was, but free shipping as I had other things to buy there.

And that is how you find me winding up with a grease gun filling syringes with grease in my computer room.  I now have a great grease gun which I may never use again, but now that I have it, it is a good tool to have.  The grease is all parceled out with one syringe to spare (yes, I am less than efficient at filling the things, though I got better by the last two or three), and having already parceled out my oil.  Next up is labeling, then on to the other liquids, so that I can now have a nice maintenance kit to carry along with me and leave the huge bottles at home as they have instructions on them.  And considering I got 14 syringes of grease, 3 squeeze bottles and 1 oiler bottle of oil out of it and looking at the retail cost, I would say I do, indeed, have a bargain.

Even if it is kind of weird to be wielding a grease gun to fill small syringes early in the morning... but then I do have to live with my constraints in life.  And if a friend needs some, I can toss a spare to them and tell them to 'keep it'.

Accomplishment is not in the thinking, but in the doing.

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How to steal an election

The question about ACORN registering not only dead people, but fictional characters and collections of letters as voters has come up as a question as to why this matters.  I responded to this at the Hot Air site and will then add a few thoughts at the end.  As always all problems of spelling, syntax and logic are left for the amusement of the reading public.

* * *

How to turn these phony registratants into votes?

As the ‘activist organizations’ flood the system close to or at the deadline for registration, they swamp the internal controls to verify applications. Those then get put on the rolls as voters. Someone shows up with some form of ID that will pass muster and votes.

As mentioned many of the voter rolls are out and names crossed off as people show up. If you have a database of individuals you have registered or a block of addresses from which phony voters applications were put in, you can then have either a real voter or an ‘observer’ contact someone on the outside to then do a database look-up. If there is not a strict accounting of the actual photo ID, such as taking the driver’s license number or other identifier off of the ID, then you can have someone show up with an ID that looks valid. The cost of cardstock and laminating equipment is low in such a large operation and we have already seen fake ‘press passes’ derived from original source ones via this methodology.

This allows a small number of individuals to then do this Chicago phenomenon of ‘vote early, vote often’.

By the time the actual verification gets to an individual on the rolls, it may be weeks or months after the election, with the latter more likely due to the approaching holiday season.

This could be negated by a requirment for a valid State ID, such as driver’s license or other ID in which the polling station has a read-out for that block of individuals who live in that district. Enter the number, get the name, hand verify the name on the paper rolls, initial and time stamp it. But then you get ‘civil libertarians’ crying about how such databases can be abused, and that cross-checking is, somehow, a nefarious activity. And yet the public’s need for clean elections should have massive criminal penalties in place when such databases are compromised to undermine local democracy…. unfortunately that is not the case.

Thus criminal activity gets a slap on the wrist, civil libertarians decry cross-checking databases, organizations push in a mass of late registrations that can’t be checked and small numbers of individuals ‘vote early, vote often’ because they do not show up at the same polling places but drive from place to place. “Small” being anywhere from a handful to a few tens of people… and if the election doesn’t come out as wanted, then those individuals are sacrificed to call the election into question and claim it was ’stolen’. How many individuals in a given area would it take to convince *you* that this would represent a larger number doing this activity? Two? Three? Ten? Twenty State-wide? Fifty? And just how will you be able to discriminate between just a few individuals doing this and a larger push of which these would be a ‘representative sample’?

There is also, of course, taking a large number of blank ballots, and filling them in and crossing the names off of the rolls after the election, but that ham-handed way usually shows up due to the block of ballots involved. That is if you have a paper-trail ballot.

Really, one can be inventive with this to get to a desired result… which is undermining representative democracy.

* * *

The problem is not just the registration and a few 'bad votes' getting through: it is creating an atmosphere of suspect elections that then seek to disenfranchise the voting public by creating the appearance of fraud in the election process.  The tactic of 'flooding' voting administration offices in the last day or two of the registration cycle is one that is well known, and documented:  it is done to over-tax the registration system and get unaccountable names on the voting rolls and to get absentee ballots for those that would not normally deserve them.

Beyond that, this can be used in an area where a favored politician such organizations like ACORN are *losing* so as to create turmoil, call the ballot process into question and attempt to eliminate strong opposition districts from the vote count via appearances of impropriety.

In strong districts this is used to push up the 'win' so as to get a larger tally so that people can point to: well this candidate got the most votes, why wasn't he elected?  That was in the year 2000, in case anyone has forgotten, and it is an attempt to undermine the system of representative democracy and fairness to all citizens so that they have representative say by region and area.  Thus 'winning big' can be used as a bludgeon to try and overturn a result that is one that expresses the diverse will of the people, not just the majority.

Even if the actual votes that are fraudulent are slight, the number to turn public opinion against the process is paper thin.  Eroding that crumbles the faith in the election system, representative democracy and our respect for each other as citizens as some try to impose results via ideology and ill-means.  By undermining the system of voting and call it into question via such means, we see a direct authoritarian attempt to delegitimize representative democracy and force the will of a minority by disenfranchising voters by calling legitimate votes into question by those activities.

When politicians move money to such organizations from the public treasury, as seen with ACORN and other such groups, the entire process becomes corrosive to the freedom of the ballot and the franchise right.  That is an established right that is protected by the US Constitution and those seeking to undermine it are not only breaking the civil rights of citizens but eroding societal trust in the election process in an attempt to impose ends from unelected organizations supporting non-democratic means to impose their will on the whole of society.

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The Winds and the Cold Civil War

H/t to Instapundit pointing me at this article by Ed Driscoll on Dispatches from The Cold Civil War.

One of the strange ideas that has been promulgated in science fiction is that of alternate history.  These are historical reviews that postulate the age old question of: 'What would happen if this happened instead of what did happen?'  Normally this goes into the realm of warfare, but postulations of various sorts on society, technology, and just who dies and doesn't die at inopportune times, and then postulating a 'counter-factual' speculation of what would have happened if the events were different.  This is, actually, something we should recognize as a way to examine our ideas on historical thought: if our ideas hold up in a broader set of circumstances with well founded postulations based on intrinsic attitudes, personalities and events, then we can have some assurance we are looking at history correctly.  If, however, our ideas do *not* stand up, then we must examine them as being based on something less stable than accurate analysis, and put them aside.

I enjoy that area of fiction because it does allow authors to explore these areas and put forward that our understanding of what people do and why they do it is not so well founded.  This does have a strange set of cross-overs, however, in those postulating the 'people using machines to time travel' idea and meddling in history.  That derives from the examination that so many events were extremely 'knife edge' and many counter to the way we understand human behavior, that the only way to explain them is for someone from the future intervening in non-obvious ways to change the course of events.  What that does, however, is question our own time and timeline which has obviously been rescued from things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, a change in aircraft and aerospace outlook in the mid-1930's, an operative willing to assassinate Hitler in 1936 because he was seen as a threat to Europe and told not to do it by his UK superiors, Wilhelm acceding to British wishes on a rail line in the Ottoman Empire and not building it, to some lovely questions of what would happen if King Gustavus Adolphus had not died in 1632, if Eric the Red had gotten fed up with being pestered about converting to Christianity... or if Justinian were a bit more competent.  These are endless speculations and really quite fun as you take society, personality, capability, trade and other matters into account.  One slight change can change all of history, and really ruin ideas of 'mass movement' concepts of history as well as demolish the 'lone individual one' as the flux up and down the scale is continuous:  all levels play in history, just as they do in real life.

If we are a timeline saved, most recently being that flock of ducks that nearly triggered WWIII into a hot war back in the 1980's, then we seem to have been forgotten in this timeline as no real interventions have happened while society decays into pointless political bickering.  My personal speculation is that this is now the 'Stuck On Stupid' universe, because all the competent ones either finished humanity off or are in some other continua having a good laugh about those of us left in this universe.

It is a form of ongoing joke... but it has a point: if you want to be rescued, then do keep the society that is both resilient enough and has enough good individuals in it to do that rescue.  Never depend on just one end of the scale and expect salvation... like the Roman people did as the Empire decayed.  Soon the barbarians were seen as a solution, and civilization fell again.

One of the few pieces that I've written that has gotten any notice at all, is that on The Long Term Consequences of Defeat.  In that I take a look at the actual cost of the Vietnam War's aftermath to those we left behind because we didn't mean it when we said we would support a friend and ally.  Contrary to the erudite sniffing, the 'Domino Effect' did take place and reached a natural stopping point at the sea.  To get there it killed tens of millions who's only crime was being political enemies of the victors and those who followed their politics.  Pol Pot's multi-year killing spree started out with anyone who was a threat to his regime and could publicize what was to come:  journalists, writers, editors, advertisers.  Soon it encompassed all of the intelligentsia.  Then Pol Pot realized that if you *looked* smart you must *be* smart, so wearing glasses was punishable by death.  If you looked pretty, that was uncommon and a threat, and so you died.  That is 'identity politics' taken to its natural conclusion.  The greater aftermath would cause more death to other people on this Earth and the USSR, which had been pushed to the brink of collapse was given breathing space to try and recover.  Fully 25% of their economy was devoted to keeping the US embroiled in Vietnam, while the US spent 6 to 8% out of a much, much, much larger economy.  And even though it was not the US that would pay for that, those who would pay had no defense against a superpower bent on domination.

Those who wanted out of Vietnam have not answered for their ill considered ideas and ideals, and the blood that pools around their feet, a gift of their politics and outlook.

As I've pointed out utilizing a slightly different look in one of the topics on alt-history: History is not inevitable.  There is no inevitable outcome to any action taken, no great graced pathway to perfection for humanity.  If 15% of Europe died during the 30 years war fighting about how best to worship The Prince of Peace, then the millions and hundreds of millions dead to the worship of socialism and its noxious off-shoots in the 20th century are as bad if not worse.  Both had taken paths that their leaders and many of their people, but by no means a majority, felt was 'inevitable'.  Growing up in a family of 'scientific socialists' that actually bothered to analyze Marx and decry the uses his works were put to by others, finally led me to the realization that much of socialism is delimited by its historical founding and the attitude of that era seeing an up and coming 'end state' of humanity.  While that first article is haphazard, the next I put out on the topic is more to the point and examines the well known Theory and Practice Conundrum when applied to socialism.  This is a well understood concept in the areas of science and engineering and goes like this: 

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.

In practice there is.

This is where not only the idealists stumble, but those following an idealistic 'perfect course' of 'just doing everything right' and you will get to the promised land.  Thus we get lovely 'theories' backed by linguistic sleight of hand, that postulates all sorts of weird, nice things, and then falls on its face when actually tried.  Changing the definition of, say, gravity, does not remove it as a force in the universe.  Calling all those who disagree with you politically as 'imbeciles', 'racists', 'haters', 'dumb', etc. does not make them so, and actually calls attention to one's own limited capability to grasp humans as individuals beyond the 'conceptual' stage.

Of the most ill thoughts purported is the concept that if you just 'regulate' things and just 'make laws' that everything will magically alter and change to fit those 'regulations' and 'laws'.  The cartoon I remember growing up poked fun at this in There Ought To Be A Law.  Thus driving slowly in the passing lane should not be an anti-survival characteristic or an attempt to test the braking system of that 50 ton truck going faster than you are, but *illegal*.  In theory you can do that, but in fact its insane to try and creates unnecessary legislation and law that then gets exploited to raise money via unequal enforcement of that law.  Save when someone doing the act is tossed from the gene pool by their own idiocy.

In fact, no, there SHOULDN'T BE A LAW for everything.  What that creates is trying to live ones life by having it DICTATED TO YOU BY GOVERNMENT.  Even worse than trying to ban 'hate speech' is the nefarious idea that you can actually DEFINE it in any meaningful way, shape or form.  What those people who push for speech codes are doing is seeking to change YOU by castigation by that role of government known as the Punisher.  That is not called 'Progressive' or 'modern' or 'free thinking': it is, by definition, Authoritarian.

The activity of trying to transform language by shifting its basis to suit political ideology while attempting to retain older emotional import is also described as speech, itself, devolves into meaningless babble.  George Orwell called it 'Duckspeak' and that is where those who feel the need to change well known and historically relevant ideas and phrases have gone to the past 60 years.  Racism is an active, not passive affair: you must take activities to show you are racist, not have it imputed by some cryptology that imputes clear meaning is 'tinged' with overtones. 

If you just squint hard enough to see it.

Squinting that hard closes your eyes.

At that point you are replacing what is actually said with what you WANT to BELIEVE is said.  That is a fantasy ideology that utilizes that conception of things.  On the links to the side of the page I have a link to Lee Harris as he examines another group with a fantasy ideology:  al Qaeda.  Their leaders believed that if they did a few acts to demonstrate their resolve that the mystical would occur and the US would fall.  Their strange takes on economics is one of the weirdest things ever written and is nearly impossible to figure out.  It is called The Management of Savagery and it is the al Qaeda Big Book of Strategy.  It is every bit as fantastical as anything spouted by the Left these days, save that al Qaeda wants big, bloody footprints and is finding that they aren't coming so easily these days, while those on the Left always say they want to avoid them and end up with the pools of blood at their feet. 

That is fantasy ideology: when what you think will happen does not happen as you want it to by taking the actions you do.

By not recognizing that failure and addressing the ideology ITSELF an individual delves deeper into fantastical thought and becomes less attached to this actual, real world even when forming up 'real world communities' that can never bring themselves to address the real live actual reality without trying to see it through a pre-broken prism of politics.  And then, when hateful attitudes are taken to others and attributed to that cryptographic word play that they think is the 'real meaning' instead of just reasoning based on the words being spoken, then we hear rationalizations as to why an individual's own personal abhorrent attitudes are actually 'acceptable' because those that they have re-interpreted are 'worse'.  At some point the concept of reasoning from understanding has turned into rationalization of horrific activity, to the point where those seeking to break down society on a global basis are lionized, and those trying to uphold community made without 'community organizers' are demeaned and belittled.

That is not healthy for individuals, for society, for politics and can only lead to ill ends for all of them if those individuals can try to exercise their fantasies upon a larger population.

I've spent the last couple of years going through terrorism, organized crime, corrupt politics, unsafe banking, political payoffs, and the growing tide of authoritarianism in society.  Through that I've seen the deep interconnections of all of these with the power elite in society on all sides: political, economic, criminal, law enforcement, military.  I've done long and hard research into what terrorism actually *is* as an activity - not our modern attempt to pussyfoot around with it, but the actual activity itself shorn of all politics and religion.  It is a damned surprising conclusion as so many people think that this is something new under the sun while, in fact, it is as old as the very first huts to go up in a village and those villagers banding together to seek common defense.

It is called: Private War.

And the founders knew about it, and placed the powers to address it in the US Constitution in the only reasonable way possible: extract equal measure from those practicing it as they have inflicted on YOU.  That goes back to Grotius, but the actual concept goes back thousands of years.  By trying to condone it, those that do so are joining in reveling in tearing down civilization.  The very same one that keeps them alive.

 

I really don't know which is worse:

Having 'Conservatives' who can't be bothered to actually read and understand such documents as keeps civilization going,

or

'Liberals' who are actively trying to deny that such basic foundational concepts exist.

 

It ain't good no matter which way you slice the politics.  It is still bologna.

Which is worse?  Those who claim to care about the founding and then don't understand it? Or those that claim to be so 'intelligent' that they can't be bothered to do any research AT ALL?

Lets have a Cold Civil War of Morons!

Or, as my quip goes: Morons need Lessons.

Yup, the research is hard!  I have catalepsy and constant exhaustion, to the point where actually reading anything becomes difficult.  So I get three or four coherent hours a day, more if I'm lucky.  And I do not spend all of it reading and thinking, but lots of it in a dulled state of awareness.  Only in the past year have I been able to do some pleasure reading... and that only because I had pored through so much of the necessary basics for our civilization that I finally had a state of awareness slowly come back to me.

What's your excuse?

To those who point to all the reading of the Holy Bible or all the lovely polemics of Democratic Underground or traipsing for the nth time through The Communist Manifesto:  could you fit in de Vattel's Law of Nations in there, say a chapter on alternating weekends for a half-hour or so?  Maybe Grotius' Laws of War and Peace and his Laws of the Sea?  How about Blackstone's Commentaries on the Common Law of England?  The Peace of Westphalia?  Because if we are so much god-damned *better* and *advanced* than our founders, the least we could do is READ the stuff THEY DID to understand what they put down.  Once you run across a few variants of the start of the Declaration of Independence, you begin to realize that it isn't such a revolutionary document but an encapsulation of nearly four centuries of thought on those matters.  That, to me, is horrifically awe-inspiring that Jefferson with editing help from Franklin could distill so much work into such a small space.  It isn't that the ideals were revolutionary, it was their application and quick and cogent summation assuming that later readers would know where they got their inspiration FROM.

That is what you get from looking at those works: a deep and profound appreciation of just what it takes to step away from barbarism and into an accountable society of free people.

My various 'Winds' articles on how this has been building the past year or so does coincide with that of Mr. Lileks and others who started then.   They encompass that strange feeling that we are, well and truly, on our own and about to royally screw things up in a way that will leave them unable to be unscrewed.  When looking at The two party trainwreck, we see how behaviors coincide between elected officials to yield a poor result: the two party system has stabilized on the lowest common denominator of 'what it takes to get re-elected' then use the power of the office to sinecure that position.  That becomes a joint piece of work regardless of party due to the type of powers held by the parties and those in office.  If you want to 'reform the system' you need to distribute democracy down to the local level, as that was the basis of the founding and there were complaints of 'concentration of power' even back then.

What appears are 'factions' within each party, which used to be a set of coherent voting blocks.  Looking at the Republican Party, my views on the factions and their fallouts examines that the three main factions are each subdivided between 'Progressive' concepts and 'Traditionalist' concepts:  if you want to use the power of government to enforce any moral behavior or code of activity then that is 'Progressivism'.  The 'Traditionalists' want nothing, whatsoever, to do with handing government more power as it is a Punisher, and you don't really like to give more power to Punishers.  A necessary Punisher, yes, which means you keep it restricted and accountable for the very few things you want it to do.

Original 'Progressivism' brought about the noxious plants of flourishing communism and fascism, as others took up the cause with vigor, but those societies had already had some start in those from their own political lineage.  Adding in American views on how to consolidate power to government led to tens of millions dead globally in the 20th century and America retaining the foundation of the 'Progressive' views.  Those views morphed in the last half of the 20th century and became a form of politics that shifted from global socialism of the Marxist stripe to Transnational Progressivism of the authoritarian 'government knows better than you, or else' stripe.  Transnational Progressivism, like its Socialist predecessor, has two strains:  Right and Left.  Both seek to divide society and put in an intelligentsia 'elite' group after using categorical divisions placed upon Groups of individuals.  Both seek to have individuals go into Groups by skin color, ethnicity, gender, religion and other non-personal determined parts of an individual's life, like social standing at birth via economic capability of one's parents.

Those two sections break down into the Left Transnational Progressivists seeking a break-down via race, ethnicity and 'intelligence' with economics being used as a negative determinant, and the Right Transnational Progressivists who want to place individuals into permanent economic classes and dissolve Western Liberal Society under the guidance of 'intelligent global economic views'.  These both germinated in the 1960's while a third form of Transnationalism also started, and it is the worst of horrific triplets.  It goes by the name of Transnational Terrorism and currently has a religious component that dominates in the realm of Islam.  That outlook seeks to use religion as the primary determinant with the 'believers' getting the chance to have rights and everyone else getting the short end of the stick.  All of these join up in wanting the destruction of Western Liberalism and Individual Rights.  Whenever you hear about 'group based' analysis, you are looking at someone doing a Transnationalist analysis, trying to engender differences by Groups so that there is an affiliation of behavior by Group and a treatment of Individuals by Group... and to hell with personal accountability.  The Transnational Left thinks it has its winning hand via the Saul Alinsky/Bill Ayers route of indoctrination via education, Transnational Right looks to impose economic efficiency via organs like the Wall Street Journal and its anti-Nationalist views on illegal immigration and liquidating culture on a regional basis and utilizes the power of capital growth and wealth accumulation to attract its adherents, and the Transnational Terrorists just want to kill you if you disagree with what they do, and rule by intimidation and terror.

This sort of deal now puts Traditionalist Conservatives and Go-along, Get-along Jacksonians in the same boat, a position that has never been occupied due to the older Individualism vs. Society Necessary outlooks, where the stresses between wanting Individualism to reign over society and those pointing out that Society creates the space for Individualism have been at logger-heads since the founding.  Now they are in the same boat by circumstance and the ability of Traditionalist Conservatives to support Society Minimal standards and Jacksonians to push Individual Accountability views now must find common accord as no one else wants them in the Transnationalist Camps.  And yet there is overlap between them, and always has been, and it is the exact, same overlap between the Pioneers and Explorers, and First Settlers.  Someone needs to ensure that wilderness is understood enough so that society can flourish and be protected, and that common job of ensuring the wilderness doesn't overgrow society falls heavily on these two outlooks as NO ONE ELSE wants to do those jobs.

These two areas of culture have overlapped and intergrown in the 40 years since the Jacksonians were read out of the Democratic Party and now form 'Polarized America'.  Those trendlines are important and grossly overlooked in the Red/Blue conceptualization of America.  There are those who have bemoaned that this will be the 'ruining of America' when those who stick to what works will be seen as backward compared to their 'more advanced' urban cousins.  And yet it is that same grouping of Traditionalists and Jacksonians that are encroaching on the Urban centers in this land known as Suburbia and Exurbia.  The Red/Blue divide masks the great Interstate Bypass Divide, where any city large enough to get an Interstate Bypass can delineate its political views into Urban/Transnationalist and Suburban/Traditionalist and Jacksonian.

And that is the Battleground of the Cold Civil War: those who want to stay in cities with all of its lovely cultural artifacts and those who want to create good culture to sustain their outlooks on the world.  One is centralized and imposed and adores cities and full blown top-down control structures, and the other is decentralized, lateral and allows an individualist stamp to be put on one's life so that one's values can be sustained.  The Urban regions are trying to grow outwards, but have an unsustainable population ethos of 'two children being a drain is all you can afford to have' and 'sustainable growth': both of which mean stagnation of culture.  Jacksonians and Traditionalists see children as a great boon to families, that finances can be stretched to increase coverage while nominally living with lower living standards, and that one makes growth for themselves and sees no need for growth based on productivity to be 'sustainable' outside of sustaining one self and one's family.

Often those battle lines are hazy, and there are sections of rural America that enjoys the largesse of federal handouts, just as there are still some Urban Black neighborhoods that disdain criminal gangs and support sustainment of self and family above all other things while creating a good community in doing so.  If you have a hand out to receive from the public coffers you find it very hard to give yourself a hand up to a better life.  That is the Traditionalist Conservative view of creation of society by doing good deeds and living a good life, and it forms the basis for individualism in America.

That division is one between wanting to be absorbed into the world and disappear into a polyglot of humanity ruled by government, and those seeking to create good lives and accountable government and help those that agree with us on that basis for a better world.  The first has no standards, save destroying anything that allows individuals to achieve and wanting there to be a quick and easy system of prejudice with a handbook to tell you how to treat anyone else based on their color, gender, religion or ethnic background.  The other holds standards to one self, one's family, one's society and government so that each are held accountable and NONE have the chance to run roughshod over liberty and freedom, and working with those who support both liberty and freedom.

The first is authoritarian based and is seeking to found a new Empire of Global Discrimination with a death toll that will be unmatched by any previous authoritarian State as this will be a Global Empire.

The second is the coalescing of Free People to support their liberty and freedom via minimal accountability and hold the State down with our hands around its neck to keep it from doing anything more than the bare minimum to protect us as we depend on our good nature for charity and distrust government to ever be 'good' or 'do good'.

 

As I see it those are the 'battlelines' in the Cold Civil War as they have been drawn up.

And the people voting with their feet?

I doubt that they are the ones seeking more government.  They are the oppressed who have been told to shut up, or else.  They are the ones who have walked away from liberal democracy as it has turned authoritarian, rigid and unaccountable.

That is the Majority of America.

That is the way the population broke down when the Revolutionary War started and before the blood started to flow.

The authoritarians always resort to the force of the State to put down rebellion and start fights to divide their opponents.

And the Jacksonian credo is: "We did not start this fight.  But we sure, as Hell, will FINISH IT."

 

Welcome to the 21st century, America.

Let us hope the beliefs of the 20th don't kill us off.

Brought to you by A Citizen of the Republic

Sphere: Related Content

Who said what? Say, what?

Ok, the debate, which everyone is putting down as one of the worst of its kind, so lets just key up some phrases and then identify who said it. I will be using the RealClearPolitics transcript.

First up this bit:

"I think everybody knows now we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And a lot of you I think are worried about your jobs, your pensions, your retirement accounts, your ability to send your child or your grandchild to college."

"Worst financial crisis since the Great Depression"? Yup, Sen. Obama. And the Great Depression was all about retirement accounts, your ability to send your children to college, and...

Say, what?

The Great Depression was about not having enough jobs, loss of faith in the banking industry, runs on the banks, and not having enough money to keep a roof over your head. Does anyone remember the term 'soup kitchens' for those without work and who couldn't even buy enough food? Bread lines? Thousands of unemployed sitting outside factories hoping that, maybe, a job might get posted up today?

No?

That is not only hyperbole, it is grandstanding and clearly mis-stating history. Sen. Obama, you just lost in the American History 101 zone. This is nowhere NEAR the problems of the Great Depression, not even close by a long shot. This might be the largest 'crisis' since 'Stagflation' of President Carter's era, or the Wall Street Bust of 1987, or the collapse of the Tech Bubble that started in 2000. Although 'Stagflation' probably takes the cake amongst these.

Second up comes this lovely bit:

We've got to have a package of reforms and it has got to lead to reform prosperity and peace in the world. And I think that this problem has become so severe, as you know, that we're going to have to do something about home values.

Someone is running for President of the World!

Say, what?

And that is... Sen. McCain.

Hey, I thought he was running for President of the United States... but I guess he is going to take reform to all these other countries like China, Russia, Iran, Egypt, Libya, Syria... maybe even France and Germany! And then we will teach them about reform, peace and prosperity!

Are you sure these guys don't have the same guys writing their talking points?

Now we get to 'bi-partisanship' on the third bit which features both candidates on who they want in the Treasury and I will obfuscate who is which with a [redacted]. First the one candidate:

Well, Warren would be a pretty good choice -- Warren Buffett, and I'm pleased to have his support. But there are other folks out there. The key is making sure that the next treasury secretary understands that it's not enough just to help those at the top.

Now the other candidate:

A supporter of Sen. [redacted] is Warren Buffett [chairman of Berkshire Hathaway]. He has already weighed in and helped stabilize some of the difficulties in the markets and with companies and corporations, institutions today.

Hey! If Warren Buffet is so smart, then why isn't he telling these guys that letting the financial institutions handle this and clear out the bad actors is the way to go? That there is good, personal responsibility like Mr. Buffett has shown and that we need more of that and less 'federal help'? Perhaps Mr. Buffett doesn't believe in a non-activist government?

Yes it was Sen. Obama first and Sen. McCain second, both talking on who would be good to have in the Treasury. From what I've seen Warren Buffett is a nice guy... and I'm damned glad he is on the OUTSIDE of Washington looking IN. Put him in Treasury and his credibility tanks... and you had better damned well make sure his large and deep financial connections via holdings are put so far away out of his reach that there is not even the slightest hint of impropriety.

Fourth bit:

Sen. [redacted] is right that we've got to stabilize housing prices. But underlying that is loss of jobs and loss of income. That's something that the next treasury secretary is going to have to work on.

Say, what?

Current seasonally adjusted unemployment rate as of 03 OCT 2008 for SEP 2008 is 6.1%. Last seen in MAY-SEP 2003 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics where it peaked at 6.3 and then declined. It was also seen in the period of NOV 1990 to JUL 1994, JAN 1980 to JUL 1987, NOV 1974 to APR 1978, OCT 1960 to NOV 1961, FEB to DEC 1958 and MAY 1949 to MAR 1950. Plus a few months scattered in the non 6.1% and above periods. Two things of interest in this: those periods just after the 1950 and just after the 1961 end periods featured the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Yes there are unemployment raises and dips, but, apparently, a Nation at war doesn't have as much problem with unemployment because people are employed in supporting it.

As the modern armed forces quip goes: 'The Marine Corps is at war, America is out shopping.'

That part came from Sen. Obama, who is raising the specter of a huge unemployment problem while it was the policies that were put in place by President Carter and that President Reagan tried to deal with that caused the 1980-1987 unemployment era with all sorts of 'jobs programs' and 'worker support' and the federal government trying to tell people how to do their jobs. That went north of 10% nationally and I remember how all those nice 'ideas' raised those problems even higher on a local basis during the 'Rust Belt' era. And from what I've seen of his 'economic plan' on mandates in health care, involvement in the housing market, and all sorts of other, lovely government expenditures like his new Interior Security Department that will be the size of DoD, that some folks might begin pining for the fiscal soundness of President Carter.

Now, here's the deal: is the 'housing crisis' a CAUSE or an EFFECT of government policies in lending to people who can't hold a steady job?

And if you have people who can't 'make ends meet' because they can't hold a steady job, then why should they seek to OWN a home? If there is a decline in jobs or even a period of low wage growth and the mortgages continue to balloon out of all proportion to what people can earn you see problems in the housing market. Because these people shouldn't have tried to own a home IN THE FIRST PLACE.

To 'stabilize' the housing market you get the federal policies on lending OUT of the picture, let the market CORRECT itself, and abolish the institutions on the federal side that CAUSED these loans to be made. The job market will then sort itself out, the 'bad loans' will hit the economy and the economy will RECOVER ON ITS OWN without any of the 'help' that got it into this mess IN THE FIRST PLACE.

You want to stabilize jobs? Good.

Get out of dictating unsound monetary and fiscal policy on the part of the federal government so that people have to realize that being able to own a home is an exercise in LIBERTY not a RIGHT.

Number five on the 'say, what?' area:

So this rescue package means that we will stabilize markets, we will shore up these institutions. But it's not enough. That's why we're going to have to go out into the housing market and we're going to have to buy up these bad loans and we're going to have to stabilize home values, and that way, Americans, like Alan, can realize the American dream and stay in their home.

Yes, going into the housing market to buy up loans of those who were encouraged to give and get them on an unsound financial basis is to be *rewarded*.

Say, what?

That is from Sen. ACORN... no, wait... Sen. McCain! Yes, he is running with the ACORN bail-out plan, who are one of the leading causes of this 'crisis' and now seek to profit from the 'bailout' by getting lots of federal funds to 'help poor people' that they encouraged to get such unsound loans IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Yes, we have two candidates that can't figure out anything in economics because they are convinced that it is too difficult to figure out. Just give the money away and it will all be fine....

Taxpayer money.

Your money and mine.

Number six, a description of 'socialism':

You know that home values of retirees continues to decline and people are no longer able to afford their mortgage payments. As president of the United States, Alan, I would order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes -- at the diminished value of those homes and let people be able to make those -- be able to make those payments and stay in their homes.

Government comes in, relieves you of your responsibility, acts responsible FOR YOU, then forces YOU to take a deal you could never have gotten on your own. All due to YOU being fiscally irresponsible enough to seek a loan above your means.

Say, what?

That comes from Sen. McCain.

When I say Sen. McCain is a Democratic Socialist, this is what I mean.

Number seven, and its a doozy:

And then long-term we've got to fix our health care system, we've got to fix our energy system that is putting such an enormous burden on families. You need somebody working for you and you've got to have somebody in Washington who is thinking about the middle class and not just those who can afford to hire lobbyists.

So the medical lobbies and energy lobbies aren't that powerful, huh? Can't scrape up a lobbyist between them?

Going to the OpenSecrets Lobbying Spending database we get the top lobbying areas by sector for 1998-2008.

#1 Finance, Insurance & Real Estate - $3.2 billion

#2 Health - $3.04 billion

#3 Misc. Business - $2.9 billion

#4 Communication/Electronics - $2.6 billion

#5 Energy & Natural Resources - $2.1 billion

Say, what?

Who is the solon of wisdom that wants to give more lobbyists for the #2 and #5 lobbying areas more power in Congress?

The quote is from Sen. Obama.

If you thought $3.2 billion in lobbying to get us a $700 billion bailout was bad, just imagine what happens when over $5 billion gets applied to Health and Energy. Because Sen. Obama seems to have forgotten that these groups ALREADY HAVE LOBBYISTS. And Congress is definitely NOT 'looking out for the middle class'. Nor can a President easily STOP THEM.

And note that neither of these swell bozos wants to get rid of Fannie and Freddie, cut AIG loose, and remove the Congressionally mandated lax federal regulations and laws regarding lending. They both want to KEEP the current lobbyists in positions of power and empower two more of the largest to take a larger say in how the government runs OUR LIVES.

Number eight, socialist economics and how it works:

Well, Oliver, first, let me tell you what's in the rescue package for you. Right now, the credit markets are frozen up and what that means, as a practical matter, is that small businesses and some large businesses just can't get loans.

If they can't get a loan, that means that they can't make payroll. If they can't make payroll, then they may end up having to shut their doors and lay people off.

Yes, businesses get loans to pay their employees. They don't do manufacturing, sales, production and such to get income... you see, without credit these big and small companies can't borrow enough to pay people... that is how socialists imagine capitalism works.

That came from Sen. Obama.

Say, what?

Of course you can MAKE PAYROLL without a loan - that is what sales and profit are all about. By adding work value to an item and selling it at the cost of that work plus original materials plus profit to keep overhead & maintenance going, along with any longer term plans sustained, you can, indeed, make payroll. In tough times it is expansion and longer term plans that get cut first to sustain current production and maintaining overhead. Extras get cut out, like 'freebie' lunch programs or other incentives. Or added 'non wage benefits' get cut, like 'health insurance'.

Oh, wait a second, Sen. Obama wants to MANDATE health coverage, thus removing flexibility from businesses and ensuring a good costing of health benefits gets done. And because government will say this MUST BE A PART OF EXPENDITURES businesses will have an ever increasing burden in their infrastructure that they will be unable to do anything with during tough economic times. While it may help in the overall economy, trying to 'share the burden' means that smaller businesses carry a larger proportion of the load because they don't have the infrastructure to properly cope with such MANDATES. Even exempting 'small businesses' there is a great gulf and wealth of businesses between 501 and 5,000 people that serves as a major backbone to the US economy.

Number nine, running down the American worker as we are today:

The point is -- the point is that we can fix our economy. Americans' workers are the best in the world. They're the fundamental aspect of America's economy.

They're the most innovative. They're the best -- they're most -- have best -- we're the best exporters. We're the best importers. They're most effective. They are the best workers in the world.

And we've got to give them a chance. They've got -- we've got to give them a chance to do their best again. And they are the innocent bystanders here in what is the biggest financial crisis and challenge of our time. We can do it.

"We've got to give them a chance to do their best again"?

After saying that we are the best, most productive, most talented people on the earth?

Apparently we are 'innocent bystanders' in this mess, right?

I don't know about you, but as a person who took out a loan that could be afforded, at a good rate and gets payments in promptly and pay down the capital part of that debt, I don't feel like an innocent bystander.

I feel like the TARGET as I am the one who pays my taxes and will have MY money going to those who should have KNOWN BETTER and been REFUSED loans.

Who is the bozo who says we are 'the best' and that we can 'do their best again' who are unwitting patsies in this?

Sen. McCain said that and if it weren't wholly unintelligible I wouldn't be offended. I understand it and I'm insulted. Yeah, Sen. Obama has said the same, they are 'bi-partisan' on this and they have BOTH insulted me.

Number ten, forgetting history:

No, I am confident about the American economy. But we are going to have to have some leadership from Washington that not only sets out much better regulations for the financial system.

The problem is we still have a archaic, 20th-century regulatory system for 21st-century financial markets. We're going to have to coordinate with other countries to make sure that whatever actions we take work.

All of the regulation concepts started in the 20th century and continued on, being 'updated' by those wanting to INCREASE regulation and provide 'incentives' for people to act fiscally irresponsible. A 21st century financial market needs LESS OF THAT not more or 'better'. All of the insanity that we have NOW is because people think they could make it 'better' and more 'fair' by taking out personal fiscal responsibility.

Say, what?

Who has forgotten this recent history? Sen. Obama is the source of that inanity.

Again.

Number eleven, promising but not telling:

You know, you may have seen your health care premiums go up. We've got to reform health care to help you and your budget.

We are going to have to deal with energy because we can't keep on borrowing from the Chinese and sending money to Saudi Arabia. We are mortgaging our children's future. We've got to have a different energy plan.

We've got to invest in college affordability. So we're going to have to make some investments, but we've also got to make spending cuts. And what I've proposed, you'll hear Sen. [redacted] say, well, he's proposing a whole bunch of new spending, but actually I'm cutting more than I'm spending so that it will be a net spending cut.

That came from President Clinton... no, wait, it was Sen. Obama! Almost sounded like 1992 again... having a candidate promise all sorts of spending without telling you how he is going to pay for it.

Say, what?

Here's the deal: for every mandate, government program and promise on energy, the plans of these two, fine bozos are not that far apart. I know. I've looked at them. They suck.

One guy promises to 'cut government programs' which then turns out to be pork and the other promises to 'cut spending' which turns out to be more spending and inability to lay a finger on anything worth cutting. I've got a good list of entire government Departments that we don't need because they haven't done the things they were set up to do.

Dept. of Education - reading rate exactly at the same level of 1958 when poor Johnny couldn't read.

Dept. of Agriculture - the largest Congressional slush fund ever devised.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - more slush funds for Congress.

Dept. of Energy - why do we have recurring energy 'crises' if this Department can't figure out how to get decent energy at an affordable price? Kill it.

These places add regulation, add government overhead, add unaccountable bureaucracy, add unaccountable payouts and don't do the jobs they are set to do. Don't get me started on SSN or Medicair/Medicaid as they should have helped people to find a better way to pay for their retirement and for their health needs WITHOUT billions from government and increasing price supports to the medical industry.

Did I just say something dirty?

Government pricing pushing the cost of medications and the providing of medical services UP? Because it DOES. Providing a tax break for businesses to provide a 'non wage benefit' is one thing. Pumping money into a system that can't track all the payments, can't figure out good health policy, and then decides what you deserve to get or not is not a system that will either keep prices down or ensure that you get a large say in your own health care. Sen. Obama plays up 'letting you keep your doctors' while I have the experience of good doctors LEAVING health insurance groups out of DISGUST for their practices and costs.

And the people who are going to be in charge of 'reform'?

Congress and bureaucrats. See the housing 'crisis'? Guess who was in charge of 'reform' for those...

I will stop here on the debate analysis.

I actually wouldn't listen to this drivel live. I wanted to keep my dinner down, my blood pressure even and my disgust in check. That is because, no matter how the 'performance' the actual meat that is being proposed is rancid and maggot infested, and that comes from both candidates and both parties. I am expected to check my good sense at the door for 'bi-partisanship' or for 'hope & change'.

So sorry, but fifth graders could have come up with these talking points and been more lucid in presenting them. Probably think them out about as well, too, as these two campaigns.

I refuse to vote for putting childish ideas and nonsense in the seat of the Executive Branch of the United States. I want good reasoning based on sound historical understanding that creates good policy from which plans are derived.

That should be simple as it is what executives DO.

Instead we get the rampant communist with a pretty face, Sen. Obama, running on a 'government can do it all' platform and then glosses over the cost of others having tried that. And we also get a social democrat, Sen. McCain, who just can't come to say that there is anything wrong with having so much government that reaches so deeply into the lives of average citizens with so little oversight and controlled by politicians who know what is 'good for us'.

One is soft on terrorism and wants to ruin the economy and leave the Nation defenseless.

The other is strong against terrorism, wants to invite in millions of people from around the world and not bother to check who they are, subvert the defenses of the Nation by not bothering to see who 'all gods children' are that are here and keep the ruinous parts of the economy going.

They both don't give a damn about your money, and see that government intervening in the lives of ordinary Americans is 'necessary'... for the good of government. Neither of these swell fools can ever say that government is now the SOURCE of many problems and must be REDUCED significantly and the tools of manipulation in our economy REMOVED from the hands of politicians. Note that the Federal Reserve not only didn't stop the 'Great Depression' but may have actually helped to cause it via its lending policies. Why is such a tool left in the hands of government? Regulation is to set the bounds of good practices, not 'fine tune' whatever is regulated: that is for the people and their businesses to work at within the bounds of good policy. These two Emirs of Incumbistan want to increase the role of government, increase regulation and have YOU pay for letting politicians meddle with social engineering on the people of the United States.

One can't understand capitalism.

One can't understand socialism.

They alternate on those daily on which is which.

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Building your own custom Pico ITX system

Alternate title:  the parts you will have problems finding.  A follow-up, of sorts, to this post about how I can find the strangest ways to kill time.

Yes I did, indeed,  decide to do something nuts: custom build a Pico ITX system using the Via EPIA PX10000G.  This is not the Artigo kit they sell, which is 'custom' in that you have to put the tiny, deck of cards size motherboard into a case and screw some screws in... no this is the 'hey wouldn't it be neat to put a computer in this?' idiocy of having a cute aluminum frame to put something into which sounds incredibly simple, but is extremely difficult.

This is not a 'case mod' custom job: the case is a piece of cast aluminum that used to house a Netgear SC-101 'network appliance' duly dubbed by many 'the toaster from hell'.

This means that I will need to do a bit of DIY custom fabrication of things like a motherboard tray, and finding ways to mount switches and such.  So the effort to find all the piddling pieces I need to actually do all this starts with the fabrication materials, switches and such.  Most of them I got from Performance-PCs, and much thanks to them for sheets of nice looking aluminum, nibblers, vandal resistant switches, assorted wiring, cabling and so on.  Really the Lian-Li case modification stuff is really quite nice with an aluminum case and should serve quite well once I get things rolling.  Also to be mentioned is Xoxide and their somewhat smaller array of materials which has some things that Performance-PCs doesn't have.

Going through my list of 'things a small system must have' includes such things as audio jacks, and you can get a nice board for the Pico ITX at Logic Supply, along with many other EPIA pieces and parts.  Also have to mention them for EPIA power supplies, and they are competitive in that pricing, too.  I bought the main board, itself, from Ewiz/NewBiiz/SuperBiiz and probably a few other names to boot.  They had a good price via Pricewatch.com on my sidebar, and it was worth saving the money as it balanced out shipping costs.  Speaking of which, my old standbys of Newegg and Mwave also get nods for some things like notebook hard drives and a nice dual notebook drive to 3.5" case bay adapter from CRU-dataport.  If you are cramming a lot into a small space you need notebook drives, and if you are going to sacrifice one out of three bays of the SC-101, you might as well get two drives in it.

But getting the major components - motherboard, memory, drives, bay adapters, switches and faceplates - that is only the *beginning*.  Yes you have all the parts and then find out that Via has decided to pull a swift one on you.

Not only do they use non-standard pin-outs for things like where you plug in the momentary switch on the motherboard, but they use smaller than standard screws for their motherboard.  And these two items begin the tale of woe...

 

The Quest for 2.0mm pitch wire to board leads

This is normally a *snap* as there are tons of places you can go to get lead wire that is pre-socketed so all you have to do is push the leads into the motherboard and then just do a bit of finagling with the tinned leads to get a solid connection to whatever it is you are hooking up to the motherboard.  Those usually use 2.54mm pitch connectors.  Via uses 2.0mm pitch connectors.

Everyone on the planet uses 2.54mm pitch connectors for standard motherboards.  I can find oodles of suppliers for lead wire that is already put into connectors and has tinned leads.  But 2.0mm pitch that isn't biased?  Bwahahahahahaha!!

I've tried all the major supply houses and can get the individual components, but a minor bit of cable assembly for 'one-off' pieces?  And, yes, you name it and I've checked it both in the US, UK, Germany, and Thailand.  Trying to figure out what I can get from China is a bit much, considering how their front organizations operate, and I've had it with enigmatic descriptions of what companies may or may not offer from China via these centralized sites.

After weeks and weeks and weeks of searching there are a few places where you might get the stuff, but so far I've found its no dice due to the wire sizing and board connecter size.  The prime one of which is SparkFun for all your electronic weirdnesses and parts you can't seem to find anywhere else.  A great place for robotics projects and such and you can find 2.0mm pitch lead wires there... just not the right connector size for the 2.0mm pitch.  If you want to really part it out and DIY and make your own lead wires, then Action Electronics is a good place to go.

Go ahead, go to GlobalSpec, Octopart, Mouser, or any of their equivalents for this stuff!  Knock yourself out!  I don't care to recount the DAYS I have spent going through them... verging on weeks at this point.  I really do not want to get into the 'strip the wire and crimp the sockets and tin my own leads' stage of things.  And I am still trying SparkFun and a few other places to see if the robotics community has this problem tackled.

 

You want *what* size screws?

Ah, if you don't know about screw sizes and never intend to build a custom rig and do it DIY, then you will never need to know this.  And if you are only used to working with full size PCs and never intend to do otherwise, this is also terrain you won't cover until one of the EPIA systems gets wildly popular, everyone wants one and no one will have the screws for them.  Fun was not had.

First the screws in the SC-101 were Torx screws.  They were *not* M4 screws.  Nor are they exactly M2 screws.  Nor M3 screws. Nor M2.5 screws.  They are just between M2 and M2.5 screws which yields no real easy English measurement, which falls on both sides of the M2 and M2.5 sizing.  My guess is that they are either fine thread M2.5 or coarse thread M2 screws.  My solution will be to use M2 screws with Blue Loctite (242).  My thanks to Henkel's Loctite folks for making a good solution for this sort of thing.  I had to find some Red Loctite for my Ruger and mounting the Weaver Scope Mount on it, and I finally chose the lowest end of Red Loctite (262) which doesn't need a heat application to get it off.  Yes!  I am going to cheat!  It is either that or drill and tap my own screw holes and hope I don't ruin the existing ones in doing so.

So where do you head for screws and associated materials?  Well there are two choices out zillions... if you want cheap and easy it is the Tools, Auto & Industrial part of Amazon.  Really!  You wouldn't believe the good stuff they have there, including super thin shim stock for doing case finishing.  What a selection of stuff... really, recommended.

The other place is McMaster-Carr, which has a great selection of everything from small parts to everything you need to outfit your home.  It is a bit more expensive, but if you decide on 'one-stop shopping' then it is worth checking out since it scales from the small to the large, equipment-wise.  Couldn't find 2.0mm pitch lead wire there...

 

Where is the project build?

I have all the major parts!

The wire to connect it all up and the screws to tighten stuff into where it is going to have to stay put?

Researching the Red Mafia or the connections of Monzer al-Kassar is a *snap* compared to this... on the plus side I did get to replace my electric drill that went missing with a nice rechargeable from Milwaukee.  It is their sub-compact driver and works perfectly.  Bought used from the factory with full warranty.  And I did buy the necessary taps for doing my own threaded screw holes from Amazon...

2.0mm pitch lead wire?

The Quest, unfortunately, is The Quest.

And that is what is killing my spare time.

That and blowing off steam writing a Star Trek story...

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The water through his hands

Back on 05 SEP 2008 I wrote about giving Sen. McCain time to show that he understood what it was that Gov. Palin was about and that he comprehended what his campaign could actually do.  As I pointed out then, his tactical outlook is very good, but his knowledge of strategy and logistics is awful - that goes beyond the military, but to how to run a political campaign.  I even utilized a sports metaphor post so that people could understand those differences, between mere tactics and strategy.  While my postings have been on the decline, my commentary at a site or two have basically summed up my feelings a month on.

I will start with a response to a posting by Mr. Z on the 'bailout crisis' after the first bailout bill did not pass and the sky did not fall nor did the world plunge into a 'depression'.  All errors in syntax, spelling, grammar and logic left in place for the amusement of the citizenry:

I refuse to have Congress bailed out of its insane ideas on the economy. This is not just the fault of Freddie, Fannie, ACORN, La Raza but also that of the Democratic Party and their willing help from the Republican Party for going on 30 years. Did you see how many Republicans *did* 'cross the aisle' in the spirit of 'bipartisanship'?

And got their butts handed to them by the other side of the aisle?

Those are more than just RINOs: they are idiots, fools and willing helpers in this mess. I damned well don't want any 'bipartisanship' as it means - hand over what the Democrats want and cry about it afterwards.

Let these damned things fail and then REPEAL the CRA and all legislation that puts the government INTO the home loan business. It is a long-term failure and so open to abuse that it is NOT a 'public good'. And I would seriously start looking at just what has been handed over to the Fed and SEC as they have been pipsqueaks in their duty to the American people. If these are supposed to be the stewards of the economy, then it is time to seriously look at turning their jobs over to people interested in it. Which isn't the federal government, apparently.

I've had it with this inanity... I don't want any more 'government help' for anyone, or 'government protection' beyond equal enforcement of the law, keeping our borders safe and ensuring threats of the foreign and domestic sort don't destroy the place. Government can't do this job well or effectively just like our founders TOLD US.

The 'spirit of bipartisanship' died when George McGovern decided to throw open the doors of his party after welcoming in the radicals and leftists.  As he now correctly points out, he opened the doors and people started to evacuate the room.  Before that 'bipartisanship' meant being strong on defense, standing up to the USSR and doing everything possible to still keep a vibrant economy even with the overhead cost of the first two.  The great irony is that Democrats were protesting a war *started* by President Kennedy and continued by President Johnson, and they would then turn on those in the party who were 'bipartisan' in that support and betray their Party and their Country all to the tune of State Control over the lives of inidividuals as the 'State knows better' what to do. 

Hey!  Whattabout that war thingie?  Why didn't it know 'what to do better' THEN?

Yeah, they turned pacifist authoritarian, seeking to undermine the Nation's resolve to supporting a government a President and Congress had asked the people to support.

Sen. McCain still wants to live in the pre-McGovern era... the JFK era... the era of 'Scoop' Jackson which would die with him after his press conference on KAL 007.  That era was already winding down when he died, and his death marks the turning point inside the Democratic Party towards vicious partisanship aimed and pro-State and pro-Government agendas to 'help people'.

That era of 'bipartisanship' is dead.

It is as dead as a doornail.

And it isn't coming back.

That is the critical message when looking at 'polarized America' and it is missed by the 'bipartisanship' hawkers:  Americans no longer want 'bipartisanship' and have, instead, voted in Gridlock to achieve their ends.  Whenever the Left ramps up its rhetoric, demeans a politician they don't agree with on the most vicious and childish of terms, their single, solitary goal is to drive voters from voting.  Of course that begins to backfire when they see politicians that they do like doing the same things that they criticize others for, and then don't have the honesty, bravery or courage of their convictions to actually APPLY THEM across the board.

Anyone who wants you to 'rally around the President' no matter who is elected has not faced up to the partisan, vicious tenor of politics started and continued on by the Left in America.  If we still have more civil politics than other Nations who have gone under to this disease, the disease of forgetting that society creates government and supports it and not the other way around, it is because of the Great Interstate Bypass Divide in America, that I talked about in Sen. McCain's second chance.  That is a major problem for the Left as their natural root-base is the same as Socialism in Europe: urban centers.  And America is inherently a suburban, small town and rural Nation.

So, when Peggy Noonan sounds the great trumpet of 'bipartisan support' for whoever is elected next, I have a problem.  Where the hell are those on the Left willing to do that NOW?  Mr. Z looked at that and lets just say that Peggy Noonan has lost several notches in my relatively low estimation of her:

A rant follows, read at your own risk.

Say, Peggy, when are you going to tell the Liberals to get behind more conservative Presidents? And if you have asked, why don't they do it?

Welcome to the land of 'bipartisanship' where *your* side gets to give in each and every time to be 'nice' to the authoritarians. Good luck on that, I tellya.... I've had it with WFB conservatives standing athwart history yelling 'stop!' and then saying: 'well, if you won't I'll just follow along...' Gots a few of those left in the RINO party? We have a lot of those RINOs in VA, where they are always 'reaching across the aisle' to get kicked in the teeth and then in the ass. They NEVER learn. They are not for a party, not for principles and wholly out for themselves.

Stop worshipping at the shrine of WFB and RR. They didn't do what was necessary to say 'NO' and mean it by their actions. And TR was the one who STARTED all the intrusions of the State into your lives, so you might want to think a bit about the man and read his autobiography, and then realize that the powers he sought for the office went with the office and not the man... which he hated when he was on the receiving end of it.

So instead of being athwart history, how about: 'No further and its time to roll back the State as we have given it too damned much power over our lives.'? Because that is what good Presidents *do*... they see the need for limitations on power, veto legislation that goes beyond that, and then call for the repeal of those things infringing upon the rights of the States and the people. Yeah, I like TR, but I see the problems in what he did, how he did it and that he was honest enough to put those both forward to let history decide on him *without* rose colored glasses. That means I like and admire him as a man, see his shortcomings as a politicians and the problems he caused thinking that only good and worthy people will get to high office all the time. He ignored the founders to *our* peril, and lived to see power used wrongly in the hands of a successor.

It is very simple to tell the difference between those who hold themselves accountable and those who weasel out of their past. Which is why I see the decision to be made this cycle between the horrific and the detestable. Between a 'post-partisan' Fascist and a 'bi-partisan' Social Democrat... and I detest, utterly detest, Socialism. Both these guys want to put *more* power in the hands of the government which means Congress.

Can't the Kumbaya Konservatives see where this has gone over the past 90 years?

Sen. McCain has had nearly a *month* to storm Appalachia with Palin and he hasn't even *started*. He wants to 'reach across the aisle' to the metroweenies in the D party and ignores social and fiscal conservatism that strikes to the root of the D party holdings in Appalachia. Can you imagine how he is going to 'reform' the R party if he WINS? I can and am absolutely horrified at the prospect of either of these candidates 'winning'. Just how many more Specters and Grahams do you *want* in the R party, anyways? Because those are the types McCain will *support*. If McCain really backed conservative principles then Palin would have been running hard and non-stop through Appalachia and the Rust Belt and say 'screw the debates'.

He would have said 'screw this bailout, it is Congress' fault and I'm willing to take my share of the blame, but everyone in Congress gets a slice of humble pie, too.' And then call for the repeal of the CRA, Fannie and Freddie all in one bill. He could explain that we do not reward fiscal irresponsibility at the highest levels of government and the Nation will now take its licks for doing something insane through its elected representatives who caused this problem in the first place.
You know? A conservative? Small government? Accountable government? Lean government? Pointy end of the stick?

I would *vote* for that.

Bi-partisanship? Its Socialism with a smiley face to it.

The only good thing is even though McCain sucks like an Electrolux, Obama sucks like a Hoover... and they both suck in great gusts of wind and hot air. Which sucks more? Doesn't matter... they both suck.

I'm fed up with the rah-rah Republicans. And I detest, with a great loathing, the Democratic party.

I love my Nation. Our politicians are not worthy of holding any office. And that says much about us as a people.

I should really trademark Kumbaya Konservatives... but that would be mean spirited to the doofuses (doofii?) they embody in their Maverick RINOness.

Here's the deal: a party that can't even get candidates who actually back up the people in the party isn't much good.  The Democrats chose the easy way out of putting forward any Progressivist, Communist, Fascist, bomb-throwing anti-American, or absolute 'party first, country near the bottom of the list' individuals they can find, as long as they can say sweet words about 'helping you' as long as they get to tax the bejesus out of you for all the 'help' they want to give you... with your money.  They do, indeed, soak the rich, curb the economy, stop capital re-investment and generally work to keep the 'little guy' poor and dependant upon them.  And then reward their cronies for helping to do that and claim it really 'helped the little guy' when millions or tens of millions go to said cronies in no-performance sweetheart contracts.

So, when Mr. Z took up looking at the VP Debates and then Congress was looking to pass a worse bailout bill than the first, which stunk to high heaven so that angels passed out, well, lets just say that I was not enthused over Maverickness:

I, of course, have already said I would vote for Gov. Palin as she aligns more with my values and has more Executive experience than any of the House of Elder Emirs. I liked a few thing Reagan said, and very little of some of the things he did do and those things he *didn't* do that he said he would do. Ronald Reagan is not my touchstone: a good man, yes, but deeply flawed.

If the Republicans could support that shift in culture away from McCain and towards the blue collar to small business side and showing how they are all part of the same spectrum that is better served by small government, accountable government and lean government, then it would have a long-term winning proposition and break the stranglehold of the Democratic party in the Rust Belt and Appalachia. Sen. McCain is the unfortunate one who must see this, and he is blinded by decades of 'bipartisanship' to not see an ill-served community that is willing to hold to a small government ideal if it could now find a party to back that. I do have problems with Gov. Palin, but she is a step in the right direction and away from 'maverickism' and 'reformism'. Reforming government gets you large, inefficient and wasteful government to oversee those reforms... and then, soon, overseers for the overseers... and Congress being unaccountable and causing more 'reform'.

You cannot get from where we are to that path without, at some point, saying good-bye to 'reformers' and welcoming in those who will want small government and less government and more accountable government. And that is something that no Republican has *ever* done by carrying through their lovely words and actually cutting away at the damned government.

You do not get by on good ideas.

You do not get by in *not* instituting those good ideas.

You do not get by without putting lots of hard work in to make sure those ideas stick.

I can't vote for any of the Senators as they don't hold one conservative value that should be near and dear to all conservatism: showing up for work every day and putting in an honest day's work.

Not doing that is called: Elitist.

Voting in and accepting a 4-day work week for CONGRESS, as was done under Republicans is: Elitist. You gave good cover to the Democrats to move it down to a 3-day week.

Gov. Palin shows up for work every day, and so does her husband and they know it is tough when times get rough and you don't have a job to go to so as to do that.

If you can't even dare to espouse basic conservative ideals and hold your elected representatives to them, then *why* should anyone be impressed with your ideals?

You don't mean them.

I *do*, I *state them*, I hold *myself* to them even know when I am physically unable to do very much. I expect the exact, same thing from those I put down my vote for or they do not *get* my vote. That means that the slackluster Liberals get office positions so that they can get power to slack off and order others around to do their dirty work. That could be stopped by elected representatives holding to their ideals, and actually *working* at the damned jobs they *volunteered for* and *willingly*.

Gov. Palin winds hands-down with that. In spades.

The Senators?

Elitists, one and all.

You cannot roll-back Liberalism by claiming it is too tough to do so, and then slack off at the job and then start acting like them. You want to roll it back? Then elect people who will damned well stand up for a 5-day Congressional work week, who will work at least 8 hour days, and who will make sure that anyone who tries to slack off is noticed and put on record as such. The first person to do that will have a full time job in just doing *that*, but it will be a very, very, very good job. Count hours, name the names, and show how much these elected representatives don't give a damn about the common man.

That sort of culture can do this... not a party, but a culture. And that culture is one that has conservative ideals as its outgrowth, no matter how imperfect the persons are who are running. You will know they show up for work every day, don't slack off and force the Liberals to work *harder than they do* to get anywhere.

I can and will vote for that in a heartbeat.

Yup, willing to do the work of the Cthulhu ticket on this one: so that even if IT loses, IT wins.  At least straightforward and honest Chaos with intent towards Evil is something I can understand.

Sen. McCain has let the opportunity of his lifetime which would be to re-orient the Republican Party by creating a new coalition across the Nation to include the 'Rust Belt' and Appalachia slip through his fingers.  He could still do it... but he needs a strategist who can tell him that.  Luckily he chose Gov. Palin who knows how to fight and what to fight for politically better than HE DOES.  She doesn't want to pull out of Michigan (h/t: Allahpundit at Hot Air), which is now the worst run Democratic State in the Union as Louisiana got its wits about it and elected Gov. Jindal to pick itself up from that status.  She knows that what she is talking about that worked in Alaska will resonate and work in Michigan.

That does not mean that the campaign will *win* there, but this isn't about *just* this election cycle: it is about formulating a new basis for the Republican Party that includes working class poor, small businesses and slowly eases the role of big businesses to the side.  Because it is a recognition that the business of America is Small Business and those who work their hearts out for 6 and 7 days a week putting in long hours to create a better life for themselves, their community and their Nation.  Join those two up with messages of small government, less intrusive government, and protection from the fat cat predatory lawyers and Big Business and you can get a working coalition that will shift that entire region because those are the working ethics they utilize day by day.

Republican Elites in DC don't know how to talk to those people.

Gov. Palin can and does.

This isn't an election about 'Maverick Reform': Mavericks bust up the system, not go quietly to their stalls when pitchforks appear to prod them into confinement.  You can't get to smaller and more accountable government by adding on yet another god-damned layer of 'oversight' which distances the problem from your elected officials who are the root cause of it in the FIRST PLACE.  They don't want to be named or ever held accountable and want to create more government to insulate them from criticism on ANYTHING. 

'Reform' makes the problem WORSE.

Not better.

Because the ideas put forward have no place in a Constitutionally based Republic utilizing Representative Democracy that is harshly limited by Amendments IX and X to do much of anything to 'help people' beyond providing equal administration of the law and protecting the Nation.  Government can't take care of you... they can't even figure out how mortgage financing works because almost all of those Upon the Hill have someone else to pay their bills for them.

The job of a 'Maverick' is to find those incredibly weak areas and BUST THEM DOWN COMPLETELY so that a smaller and more well built and understood corral is put in its place.

How do I know that Sen. McCain was grandstanding?

He didn't call for the legislation to be repealed as the very first damned thing out of his mouth.

The absolutely horrific part is that he is, with all that, *still* better than Sen. Obama.

Can someone hand Gov. Palin a cluebat, please?  Because Sen. McCain needs to get over himself, realize he isn't the Progressive Theodore Roosevelt and actually start having some fun busting some legislation and government down.  Because the dream of Theodore Roosevelt has come to bad ends, no matter how well intentioned they were.

And that job will take work, and lots of it.

Some Republicans cheered at the idea that their Congresscritters would actually work, for a change.

Now they are 'mailing it in' and losing the few benefits of that work.

If you can't vote for someone who actually *will* do their job and *work at it*, then you will get what you deserve.  Because sloth is the realm of the Left - the land of giving in and giving up because the boot to your face is so much easier than standing up to 'reform' and the Nannystate they want.

When the Republican Party puts forward a 5-day workweek platform for Congress and throws anyone out of the party who votes against it, then I just might think they actually have a clue.

Because that would be a platform plank to beat people with.

And it would make an awfully nice cluebat, come to think of it.

Don't hold your breath.

Working for a living is a conservative ideal.

And a Jacksonian one.

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