The government has embraced an arrogant ideology. They claim to know the key to prosperity. It’s analogous to communism. They thought the same thing. The clever ones – themselves – would run everything. That’s the analogy. The key to prosperity is to let things run themselves. We’ll liberalize everything, let everyone look after himself, let business, not the state, run the economy. The state should have no views, no policies of its own. Just open it all up, step back, let it go and you’ll see how well everything will work if we just leave things alone.

Vaclav Havel

So what are students getting in exchange for debts that they may be paying off for a significant portion of their entire lives?–and what are we as a society getting in exchange for this vast expenditure of resources?

Certainly it is possible to get a good education at many American colleges–”good” in the sense both of an economic return that will justify the student loan debt and from the standpoint of individual intellectual development and preparation for citizenship in a democracy. But in what fraction of cases does this positive result actually occur? The current Businessweek reviews the book Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. Excerpt:

After three decades of tuition increases exceeding the overall rate of inflation, a ritzy college degree comes with a $250,000 bill. Uninspired—and usually underpaid—part-time instructors do 70 percent of the teaching these days, according to Hacker and Dreifus. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, often described as the country’s top undergraduate business program, freshmen in Management 100 are taught, in part, by undergraduates who took the course just a year or two earlier. “Few sophomores,” the authors write, “have the fund of information, techniques for coping with questions, or the skills for conducting discussions that college-level teaching requires.” Or that Penn’s $53,000 annual tuition would suggest.

At many schools, liberal arts students are cast adrift in a curricular sea of the overly vocational (at Ohio State, Turfgrass majors can specialize in either golf course or sports turf management) and the unnecessarily narrow. The authors raise an eyebrow over Stanford’s 229 undergraduate history courses, maintaining that many of these highly specialized classes simply “make life easier for the professor who often just has to use notes from his last article or the galleys of her next book.”

Some data on student loans, including a comparison to the housing bubble, here. (via Instapundit)

I disagree but I don’t do so based on the technical specifics of thorium reactors. I would argue that stopping nuclear proliferation has nothing to do with the non-military use or non-use of any particular technology.

So how do we stop nuclear proliferation? The answer is simple: We can’t.

When people talk about stopping proliferation, they forget one key fact: Nuclear weapons technology is 60 years old. You can’t stop countries from recreating a 60-year-old technology.

It’s immediately obvious that as technology in general progresses, it become easier to implement any particular technology. Technologies like computers, radar, jets, antibiotics, pesticides, etc. that were super expensive and complicated cutting-edge technology in 1945 today are so cheap and ubiquitous we don’t see them as anything special.

Nuclear technology has undergone the same evolution. In 1945 creating nuclear weapons required bleeding-edge physics and a massive industrial base. For example, one of the major bottlenecks was the lack of enough skilled machinists to create all the high-tolerance components of the bombs, reactors and separators. Today, however, all the physics and all the tools are old hat. The physics is widely understood and a $500,000 computer-controlled lathe can crank out WWII-era levels of tolerance at the touch of a button.

Imagine trying to stop a contemporary country from building the equivalent of WWII-era computers, radars, jets, antibiotics, chemical weapons, etc. You simply couldn’t do it without bombing them back to a pre-industrial tech base and keeping them there.

Even if we could stop countries from using a 60-year-old technology today, how long could we keep it up? Every year that goes by means that building nukes gets cheaper and easier. In 2045, are we seriously going to be able to prevent anyone from building a 100-year-old weapon?

Today, any country that has the barest industrial base and wants nuclear weapons can build them. Countries like Brazil and South Africa got right to the point of having nuclear weapons 30 years ago, but decided to back off of their own accord. When improvised and chaotic countries like Pakistan and North Korea have nukes, you know the proliferation horse has long since bolted and it is too late to close the barn door.

We can no longer stop proliferation by any means other than direct military action. The use by anyone of thorium or other types of reactors to provide life-saving energy for the world will have zero effect on the spread of nuclear weapons. We desperately need abundant, cheap and low-environmental-impact energy to maintain and raise the standard of living across the world. Nuclear power can provide that.

We need to stop talking and thinking about proliferation like it is 1955. We need to acknowledge that nuclear technology is no longer a high technology that we can restrict to only the most advanced and powerful nations. Doing so provides no benefit and causes a lot of harm.

Dr. Keilson devoted his life to his patients, many of them Jewish children traumatized by the war and separation from their biological parents, some of whom the Nazis had murdered. He wrote a groundbreaking and widely translated study of “sequential trauma.”

and

The novels are partly autobiographical, sparse but intricate and psychologically compelling. “The Death of the Adversary” portrays Jewish life in Germany as the Nazis gain control, but the words Jew, Germany and Hitler, referred to as “B,” never appear. The protagonist, a young Jew, feels distanced from both his own people and current events. He develops an intimate obsession with B, understanding that, as Dr. Keilson said, “B needed the Jews to project onto them what he dislikes in himself.”

(Link: NYT) Has anyone read the novels of Hans Keilson? I am intrigued.

Update: Are there other physician novelists that CBz readers care to recommend?

I am inspired and am learning a lot. I have learned that there seems to be a wave forming. A very large wave that may still be a long way away. It sort of reminds me of a vacation I just took to Michigan a few weeks ago. As I was enjoying a swim in the waters with my kids we would see a boat go by out in the distance. Several minutes later the wake from that boat would provide us with some waves to play on. Has America just seen the boat go by? I am not sure that I have seen it yet – because I live in Madison, Wisconsin.

For those who don’t know, Madison is one of the hardest liberal bastions in the nation. Imagine Berkley with snow. Here, it is the same old same old, from having lgbt counselors at the high schools to leftist marches on the state capitol. All the old “indian” names of the parks are being taken down in favor of more politically correct names (as an oddity, I believe that 50 years or so from now, the native American culture will be largely forgotten for this, but I digress). We still have stupid hippie communities. Didn’t think there were any of those left, did you?

On top of being relatively isolated from the fun (guess how much coverage the Beck rally got in our local media) I own my own business, am raising two kids, and all the rest. My plate is full. I want to help but don’t see how I can, besides sending money to those who have more time than myself. And that is what I plan to do. I would imagine that there are a lot of people like me that are super busy that may feel the same way. Am I wrong?

But there is a little good news. Ron Johnson is giving our senator Russ Feingold a real run for his senate seat and that is something I never thought I would see. I love this ad – even though Johnson is a Repuplican, he portrays himself as just a “guy”, not a politico – video.

I hope guys like Johnson won’t sell me out if they get elected and it won’t be the same ‘ol, same ‘ol in DC. From the looks of it I am thinking it won’t, but the glass will be half empty until I see the new wave in action.

To use the May 16, 2006 words of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger:

“… The world is faced with the nightmarish prospect that nuclear weapons will become a standard part of national armament and wind up in terrorist hands. The negotiations on Korean and Iranian nuclear proliferation mark a watershed. A failed diplomacy would leave us with a choice between the use of force or a world where restraint has been eroded by the inability or unwillingness of countries that have the most to lose to restrain defiant fanatics. One need only imagine what would have happened had any of the terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, London, Madrid, Istanbul or Bali involved even the crudest nuclear weapon.
 
…An indefinite continuation of the stalemate would amount to a de facto acquiescence by the international community in letting new entrants into the nuclear club. In Asia, it would spell the near-certain addition of South Korea and Japan; in the Middle East, countries such as Turkey, Egypt and even Saudi Arabia could enter the field. In such a world, all significant industrial countries would consider nuclear weapons an indispensable status symbol. Radical elements throughout the Islamic world and elsewhere would gain strength from the successful defiance of the major nuclear powers.
 
…The management of a nuclear-armed world would be infinitely more complex than maintaining the deterrent balance of two Cold War superpowers. The various nuclear countries would not only have to maintain deterrent balances with their own adversaries, a process that would not necessarily follow the principles and practices evolved over decades among the existing nuclear states. They would also have the ability and incentives to declare themselves as interested parties in general confrontations. Especially Iran, and eventually other countries of similar orientation, would be able to use nuclear arsenals to protect their revolutionary activities around the world.

That was said in 2006. It is now 2010. Kissinger’s world is now upon us.

Aircraft can fly between North Korea and Iran via China and Pakistan. If they don’t land in Pakistan at bases where we can inspect them, America will have little and unverifiable information about their contents, such as weapons-grade fissionables and nuclear weapons components. So Iran can assemble its nukes in North Korea, using North Korean fissionables, fly them to Iran via China and Pakistan, and test them in Iran.

The real question here is not whether Iran has working nuclear weapons – they certainly have that capability given that North Korea produced more than 60kg of weapons-grade plutonium – but the status of their warhead fabrication capability, i.e., can they put working nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles?

I think the answer is “Yes” and I gave my reasons why in a post titled Count Down to Iran’s Nuclear Test Revisited on the Winds of Change blog in April 2006.

So does Turkey, so does Myanmar (AKA Burma), Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

Given the successful example of Iranian nuclear break out, we are now going to see a world of a “Cuban missile crisis a month” from the North Koreans selling turn key nuclear missile complexes to irrational regimes — primarily Muslim — until the resulting nuclear chaos so infuriates the American people that we establish an “American Imperium” in self-defense.

In the interim, government defense workers like me will be gainfully employed policing American defense contractors making missile defense systems, ISO shipping container remote inspection systems and spy technology.

So What Does This Mean?

When you think of what the world will look like after Iran openly parades an A-Bomb, and we face the results of catalytic nuclear proliferation that Kissinger outlined, think of how the Indonesian Tsunami was handled:

Wall to wall media coverage, because of the visuals, US Military aide, lots of non-government relief agency appeals.

Joint Ex-President relief funds, then a slow headline fade as other events wash over it.

The recent Haitian earth quake certainly followed that script.

Horror, then the slow ‘life goes on’ fade from sight.

There are something like 2.5 million cities, towns, villages, and hamlets in the world. Over 3,000 have populations of over 100,000, and at least several hundred with populations over one million.

If we figure the million person centers are the most likely targets, then, at five nuclear detonations per decade, it’ll take at least 400 years to destroy them all.

We’ll react to them as we do to really big natural disasters. We’ll pray for the victims and the survivors, give a sigh of relief that neither we nor any of our families were there at the time, and maybe send a check, ATM payment or credit draft to the Red Cross.

We will, in a sense, become numb to them.

Governments won’t, of course. We can expect a lot more surveillance, a lot more wire-tapping, and a lot more “clandestine activity” intelligence agencies and special forces — which are the real threats to American liberty at home.

And here is the really scary part, pointed out by Daniel Ellsberg, of all people, just after the Falklands War.

When the Queen Elizabeth 2 was being used as a troop ship, and the British carrier HMS Ark Royal was carrying more than 2000 Royal Marines in addition to its large crew, it meant if either of those had been hit by the Argentine sub Santa Fe, Britain would have suffered by far the biggest military loss of life since WW2.

The British, via the US, told the Argentinians that if the Santa Fe was picked up anywhere within too close to either of the big targets, they would hit it with an airdropped nuclear torpedo.

The Argentinians decided to send the crew of the Santa Fe on cruise around the Horn for their health, and the sub spent the war off the Chilean coast.

But, as Ellsberg said, suppose the Brits had had to carry out the threat?

His basic observations were:

1. They sure as hell would have to. A bit over 100 Argie lives against many thousands of UK? And it’s a war, you know, old boy ….
 
2. Argentina couldn’t retaliate; it was a Junta of right wing generals so the support from the UN’s 3rd World caucus would have been minimal; the Soviets and Chinese would have said it was very naughty, and so might the US, but the Brits would have suffered no penalty and the result (Argies got no modern attack sub) would surely stand.
 
3. And at that point you’ve got a precedent of a fully justified nuclear strike (no civilian casualties, imminent danger, absolutely for a militarily justifiable end), and, as Ellsberg put it, “A lower wall for next time.”

So first the Iranians nuke someone, somewhere, and are nuked back at a purely military facility; then a terrorist group uses a nuke, and a training camp with some civilians around it is hit; then a Somali pirate base or a ship carrying nuclear materials at sea …. and then, really, the things are so damned handy, why reserve them just for infidels?

What about a city rising in rebellion against the true Islamic regime? (See Hama, Syria)

What about preemptive shots at terrorist facilities … or ….?

So the problem, is apt to begin Islamic — but it won’t stay Islamic. Not if it goes any length of time.

Consider, you’re the American president a decade from now, after we’ve had a couple of nuclear strikes on American bases and a few on European cities, and after we’ve hit ten targets in the Islamic world (and the Israelis have hit five and, say, the French have hit a couple). You’ve got a drug-and-illegals fortress over the border in Mexico and the Mexican government has declared that they can’t take it with their remnant army, and has asked for help.

Storm it with a few thousand marines or paras?

Or drop one air burst five kiloton tac nuke?

Now you’re the Chinese premier, and all this has been going on, and that miserable be damned Southeast Asian border is acting up, and you’ve got a warlord over the line in Laos or Burma …

“Hey,” you tell the Americans and the Russians, “if we stop bugging you about Mexico and Chechen, can we get a quiet okay here?”

The Islamic terror problem is only the crack in the bottle that the genie is most likely to come out through.
Once the nuclear genie is all the way out, you won’t be able to get it back in just by patching the big crack.

_Until America gets hit at home by a terrorist nuke._

Then the American public’s response will be with full-bore threat elimination, starting with the elimination of American politicians who get in the way of full-bore, immediate, aka nuclear, threat elimination via reducing terrorist supporting states to subsistence agriculture.

Then followed up by 2-5 nukes a year in what had been Arab countries plus Pakistan and Turkey, which would be subsequent pest control.

Not a cheery future…but now an almost certain one.

Hardly news to those of us who live in a big city. But the following caught my eye …

“Perhaps nowhere is the growing class divide more evident than in London, perhaps the world’s most important megacity. Despite a massive expansion of Britain’s huge welfare state, the ladder for upward mobility seems broken, especially in London.”

Couldn’t the expansion of the welfare state have had something to do with all this lack of opportunity, increase in poverty, and general doom-and-gloom?

(Hat tip to Glenn.)

Perhaps I’m taking on too much at once. I’m listening to Tchaikovsky’s symphonies and reading some Russian history to get a feeling for before the Revolution. I’m re-reading Daniel Martin to get a better feeling for what La Vida Es Sueño is about. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum today sent me an invitation to visualize O’Keeffe’s creative process.

And I’d really, really like to understand what is going on with the admirers of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the Tea Partiers.

I think I’m making some progress on the first two, and I certainly will go to what the O’Keeffe Museum has to offer. But I have been quite stumped on that last. So I was pleased to see that one of my Facebook friends, who goes by the pseudonym of Lexington Green, wrote a post that was endorsed by The Beck himself.

I have to say that I begin the process of understanding the followers of Beck and Palin with some prejudice. But I have some pre-thoughts about Tchaikovsky and John Fowles, too. And all that may distort what I come up with, but that’s true of anyone thinking anything. And what I am doing, trying to get into people’s heads, is double subjective: theirs and mine. But one of our distinctively human activities seems to be getting into other people’s heads. So I’m struggling with it.

Tchaikovsky spent time in both Haapsalu and Sillamäe. So have I, probably not as much as he did. I have an etching of Sillamäe in about 1860, Tchaikovsky’s time, with little Russian girls in long crinoline-lined skirts enjoying a vacation, a lodge where Soviet-era apartments now stand backgrounded by the site where the uranium plant and tailings pond later would be built. I think that his first three symphonies have a more Estonian feel to them, the last three more the Petersburg court. More reading and listening necessary.

Fowles and Pedro Calderón de la Barca were both writing about men’s maturing and how they learn to handle power. My filter there is the differential with women, and the way both authors recognize that the relationship between the sexes demonstrates and feeds into the uses of power. There’s a lot more, too. I could probably spend the rest of my life and this blog teasing it all out. I probably won’t do that, but there will be many re-readings.

Lexington Green is politically conservative, but he and others at Chicago Boyz have been willing to put up with me; I respect them, too, because they think out what they’re about. I think they actually listen to me, too, even as we disagree.

So when Green’s post was endorsed by Glenn Beck, I realized that this might be a way to get into his admirers’ minds. Green begins with a John Boyd hierarchy that I haven’t spent much time with; this is another of my departures from my friends at Chicago Boyz. But I suspect that that part can be skipped with little loss. He’s saying that Beck is taking a broad view, going up a couple of levels.

But I don’t feel like I get the rest of it. I can do a sentence-by-sentence exegesis, but that wouldn’t be quite right. I’m trying to get into Green’s and Beck’s heads, not dispute them. But there are barriers. Since I wrote that, Green has added another update, which makes some things clearer. I’ll get to the update later.

One is that so much of what Beck offers is factually flawed. Green is an intelligent person; how can he miss that? Perhaps because the bigger things he talks about in the post are more important to him. But those factual flaws are a barrier to me. A lack of fact is a poor foundation for anything to come after.

What Green likes is Beck’s creation of a large narrative.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom…

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them.

This sort of narrative is indeed attractive; I have wished for a vision that can unite Americans, that would provide a solidarity that we can rest on, a positive vision.

But there is a double-mindedness to Green’s analysis that is another barrier to me. I agree that we need unifying themes for us as Americans. Period. Unfortunately, it’s easy to unify around an enemy, and, while talking about solidarity and unity, Green develops an enemy, “the Overlords”, and a sense of aggrievedness. Since “the Overlords” are Americans too, that sense cannot be the basis for unity. But that duality is in Beck’s words too: he condemns President Obama for a cult of victimization, and then tells his followers how victimized they’ve been. And for him and for Palin, there are very definitely an “us” and a “them.” Apparently I am one of “them.” From Green:

This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.

…

Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.

…

Beck is prepping the battlefield for a generation-long battle.

I wish Green had given more specifics; Christianity is one of his uniting themes, but even his commenters point out that insisting on it is precisely one of the disuniting themes of the right. Green (and other commenters) respond that of course non-Christians are welcome in their America, but it’s hard for me not to feel that those non-Christians would be second-class citizens. So that specific doesn’t work as a uniter.

In fact, what Beck and Green are offering is a bargain, one I’ve been offered many times: give up large chunks of yourself in exchange for becoming a part of our togetherness. Every time I have accepted this bargain, I have regretted it. No mas.

Green gets more explicit in his update (now a separate post), which seems to confirm that I’m one of “them,” although I can barely recognize myself in his description of “The Opposition” (as opposed to us, “The Insurgency.”) He’s got that dreamy-eyed wish for “self-organization” that works in agent modeling and that has some validity in human affairs. The problem is that we don’t start each day anew, at least not if we want some continuity in the economy and such, and so once we’ve self-organized, it helps to institutionalize some of that.

He says his model works and The Opposition’s doesn’t, but provides no evidence. America is some kind of failure? Please.

Our country’s motto is E pluribus unum, From many, one. That was necessary for the founding fathers. The colonists had formed colonies to escape various sorts of discrimination in the home countries, but each group stayed together. Maryland was primarily Catholic, Pennsylvania primarily Quaker, and Massachusetts primarily Puritan. It would have been easy to revert to Europe’s religious wars and repression. The resolution was a broad tolerance, not an insistence that all share in one faith. Of course, the British obliged by providing an enemy to unify against. Maybe that is the only way it can be done, although I would prefer a more positive route, particularly one where I am not the enemy!

Green says some things that seem to imply he shares that broad tolerance. But Beck’s and Palin’s worlds are for believers only.

So sorry, Lex, I don’t buy it. I agree we need to fix some things in the country, to, let’s say, open up opportunity to those whose incomes have stagnated because allowing finance to run unregulated has stomped manufacturing into the ground. Or free us up to create rather than worry about whether the food from factory farms is going to poison us. Those are things that we need government to do. And the, er, “freedom” of deregulation and trying to drown government in the bathtub over the last thirty years are what have brought us those distortions. So I’ve got some evidence for my contentions.

Now what I have to figure out is why someone as intelligent as Green sees this division into Insurgents and Opposition. That might help get me into his head.

Great thanks to Glenn Beck for the mighty call-out on his TV show. He quotes this post here starting at 12:10, and continuing here. The transcript of the show is here.

This has been an interesting couple of days.

I saw a video of the Restoring Honor event, which struck me favorably. I looked at some commentary about it, and saw that no one was getting it, since everybody seems stuck looking through a straw at second-to-second issues, and narrow politics, where Beck was clearly aiming at big, culture-changing action. This is not, historically, unheard of. There is nickel-and-dime politics, and there is big, who-we-are politics. The second type only comes along once in a while, but when it does it changes the whole game. Beck sees correctly that we are living in an unusual era of major change and he is acting accordingly. I started to whip off an email to some of my usual group of pals about these penetrating insights, but it got too long. So I put it out on the blog, figuring our regular readers might like it, and didn’t think about it anymore.

Later on I saw the post was getting an unusual number of comments, indicating that it was circulating around. I was out of town in a hotel room, working, and would look at the blog from time to time since there was a continual flow of comments. I responded to a few and made sure everyone was playing well with each other. (For some reason, it is always the posts you just type from the gut and dash off that get the most interest.) Then at 10:22 p.m. our pal PurpleSlog left a comment that Beck had tweeted the post, and said “The ONLY guy to actually get it!” Whoa. How crazy is that? The tempo of incoming comments increased, but I finally had to get some sleep. Today went fine at work, and I was able to check up from time to on my iPhone. At 8:22 a.m. a commenter named Jason Wilder commented that Mr. Beck had mentioned the post on his radio show. Cool. More comments were flowing in. Then, Jonathan calls and tells me someone from the Glenn Beck Program wanted to talk to me. I was in my car on the way to the airport when a nice lady named Jenna talked to me for a few minutes. I said of course Mr. Beck could read it or say whatever he wanted about the post on his TV show.

When he did, the incoming traffic spiked and took the blog down. Crunch! The power of a Beck-O-Lanche!

We stand in awe of such vast and primal forces.

I got Jonathan on the phone, he got the hosting company on the phone, and they fixed it. I was getting a real-time feed from several friends via Facebook and email, on my phone, about the show. I got in line to get on the plane, and only then did I notice that in Louisville they have the TVs on Fox! I could have watched it.

Too funny.

So, OK, Lex. Why are you telling me all this? Surely it cannot merely be smug self-congratulation?

Ahem. Moi? Certainly not!

Let us consider the larger lessons. The ability of like-minded people to find each other, to spread ideas, to inform each other, is getting better and better all the time. This little episode is one of many examples of a critical and very hopeful fact:

Today’s tools favor our side in this struggle, which I am calling the Insurgency.

The Insurgency is based on individual freedom, autonomous decision-making, spontaneous order, voluntary association, open-mindedness, adaptiveness, transparency, networks rather than hierarchies. It is at bottom a fun loving and joyful and open spirit. In many cases this is based on religious faith. (I raise my hand.) In others it is based on love of human potential and creativeness, or other positive factors. This model works. And it works better and better with the tools of today and tomorrow.

The Opposition is based on the outdated legacy systems of the Industrial Era. It is based on assembly lines, bureaucracies, railway timetables, rationing, coercive and rule-bound action, mandatory schedules, forcing people into niches and categories, stripping them of autonomy, and turning people into petty little beasts subject to political control. That is the vision of the Opposition: People standing in line, people asking permission, people filling out forms, people without cars, without money in their pockets, who need a political favor to get anything done. It is based on nostalgia for the old-time “Big Unit” America that worked tolerably well in its day, the period roughly 1900-1950. (Michael Barone wrote about this recently.) But a system of centralized control that barely worked in its heyday is utterly unsuited to the world of today. It is increasingly falling on its face. Our institutions no longer work, because they are ill-suited to who we are, what we need, and where we want to go.

This top-down vision lives on because it is based on the self-flattering delusion that just because someone had good SAT scores he is qualified to tell millions of citizens how to live, from his desk. (Hayek could tell you why that is wrong.) The Soviet commissars couldn’t do it, and our smartypantses can’t do it, either.

And of course there are cynical, rent-seeking people who benefit from the regulatory leviathan, and don’t want it to change. All too many in this category are Republicans.

The Opposition’s model is a failure. Doubling down, as Mr. Obama has tried to do, will only dig the hole deeper. The American people have figured that out. They are looking for ways to wind up the legacy systems of the past, and move on. They are going to succeed, but the process won’t be pretty.

The Insurgency is the wave of the future. We are going to wage this struggle on the moral, intellectual and material plane, with a smile, with charity, without rancor, with confidence. Anyway, that’s how I think we should play it.

The American way of life is deeply rooted, it is alive, and it is heading for a new Renaissance. No kidding. You heard it here first. We are going to go through a rough patch, then we are going to win, hands down.

This little episode is one shiny tile in a massive mosaic that we are building together.

We have the tools.

We have our history.

We have our sense of humor.

We have each other.

We can change hearts and minds, then change ideas, then change the politics.

A fair wind is beginning to blow.

It’s going to be good.

God bless America.

So far the awesomeness is only nascent, but the grandeur of the vision is beginning to grip me.

I will be posting on the blog, shamelessly seeking assistance from our staggeringly brilliant readers, as we get into the research and writing. The CBz hive-mind is a juggernaut which nothing can withstand for long.

I plan to pick your brains, dear friends.

You have been warned!

Why?

He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.

Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral.

Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.

Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.

Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.

Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.

Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.

He is nuking out the foundations of the opposition’s moral preeminence, the very thing I proposed in this post.

Ronald Reagan said we would not defeat Communism, we would transcend it.

Beck is aiming to have America do the same thing to its decaying class of Overlords, transcend them.

Beck is prepping the battlefield for a generation-long battle.

He is that very American thing: A practical visionary.

See, simple.

Restore pride and confidence to your own side, and win the long game.

As Ronald Reagan also said, there are simple solutions, just no easy solutions.

God bless America.

[bumped]

[UPDATES BELOW THE FOLD]

UPDATE: One commenter, Richard40 who attended the rally said “As a conservative secular libertarian, I felt a bit left out … .” He said Beck could have included him by having a non-religious person on stage, and by saying “our only requirement is you believe in the founding principles of America, and wish to return to those principles.” He noted further, correctly in my view, that “The key to the Tea Party coalition is to stay unified on issues where conservatives and libertarians agree, like spending, deficit, size of government, and honest government, but allowing a big tent, that respects differences on social issues … .”

I did not go to the rally, I don’t know Glenn Beck, I don’t have a TV so I don’t know watch his show, and I am not a mind reader. So I can only speculate about this event. Other people have been a little bit stumped by it, too. I think that it was expressly not labeled as a Tea Party event. If so, that would make sense. The Tea Party is one circle on the Venn Diagram. The target audience for this event is an overlapping but not identical circle. The goal here seems to have been to encourage and mobilize one very large group of people, a huge segment of the population. No event is going to accomplish everything or appeal to everybody. Since the event included a call for forty days of prayer for the country, it was pretty obviously directed to people who pray. The totality of the coalition which is growing, which I think of as The Insurgency, is made up of several components. The unifying element is exactly the political and economic factors Richard40 mentions. A purely political event would have been a different event. There is room for all kinds of events.

And as a Roman Catholic, I will extend my hand to Richard40 and all other non-religious fellow citizens who share the same civic, political, economic and Constitutional principles I do. For the small number of doctrinaire libertarians who cannot stand dealing with someone who goes to church, I can only say, wake up, look hard at what is happening, and see who your real opponents are. We can have a civil discussion about the issues we disagree about when this current menace has been beaten back. We are in this thing together.

UPDATE II: Whoa. Mr Beck himself linked to this post, and tweeted: “The ONLY guy to actually get it!”

So, the accuracy of my penetrating analysis is confirmed.

Is the Internet the most groovy thing ever, or what?

He also mentioned his new news site The Blaze, which I am now going to look at … .

UPDATE III: Apparently Mr. Beck commented on this post on his radio show. If there is a link for that, I would appreciate it if someone would put it down in the comments. [Thanks to several people for sending the transcript. here it is.]

UPDATE IV: Beck-O-Lanche! [Moved here.]

Not so long ago I was taking part in one of those interminable discussions on a forum about the situation to do with Islam in Britain where people who have not set foot here or know anything about this country assure those of us who live here that we do not understand at all what is happening. At one point somebody asked me scornfully how many of the British Muslims’ ancestors had “come to England’s aid during the war”. After I finished explaining that it was the wrong way of phrasing the question and the country is Britain I added: “Quite a few, as it happens, especially from the Indian Empire. Have a look at the gravestones in British war cemeteries.”

There are many Muslim names among those 54,896 British and Commonwealth soldiers listed on the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres and many Muslim names together with the Sickle on the gravestones; there are war graves of Muslim soldiers in many parts of the Far East, such as Hong Kong; the Brookwood Military cemetery contains two dozen graves of Muslim dead who died in Britain of their wounds, had been buried in the Muslim Burial Ground in Horsell and were transferred in 1968. One could go on and on with lists of British war cemeteries in Europe, in North Africa, in the Middle East and in the Far East. Everywhere there are fallen soldiers from the Indian Army in both world wars and many of them are Muslims.

In World War I the volunteer Indian army played a huge part in Western Europe and the Middle East. It numbered 1.3 million and about 400,000 of them were Muslim. 74,187 Indian soldiers died in the war and tens of thousands were wounded. It is hard to distinguish exactly how many were Muslims except by the signs on the gravestones as Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims had all volunteered, all fought and all suffered casualties. We do know, however, that the first VC awarded to an Indian soldier was to a Muslim, Khudadad Khan from the Punjab district of present day Pakistan. He had distinguished himself at the First Battle of Ypres in October 1914.

Between the two wars the Indian army was reduced in numbers and was down to 200,000 men in 1939. By August 1945 it numbered around 2.5 million, the largest volunteer army in history. It fought on all fronts but distinguished itself particularly in the Far East. Over 36,000 Indian servicemen were killed in the ferocious Burmese and other campaigns and 34,354 wounded; 67,340 were taken prisoner; 4,000 decorations were given to members of the Indian Army, including 38 VCs and GCs. A good many of these went to Muslim soldiers and NCOs.

According to an article in the Defence Journal in September 1999 by Brigadier (Retired) Noor A. Husain the All India Muslim League’s sympathies from the very beginning of the war were clearly with the Allies against the Axis powers. (On the whole, this can be said for most political groupings in India. Despite later explanations, support for the pro-Japanese Indian National Army was considerably smaller than for the Allied war effort.)

The Brigadier also points out that after 1942 the proportion of Muslim soldiers went down not because of any paucity of volunteers but because of the growing political demands for Pakistan and Indian government policy. But, of course, not all Muslim soldiers came from what is now Pakistan, whose own army after 1947 had a close working relationship with the British military establishment. Over 380,000 Punjabi Muslims joined during the war, which makes it the largest single group.

The role of the British Indian Army in the two world wars, the fact that in both it constituted the largest volunteer forces to take part in the fighting, the soldiers’ bravery and the huge number of casualties tend to be forgotten at times. The role of the Muslim soldiers, while the equivalent to that of the Hindus, Sikhs and Gurkhas, needs to be emphasised for a very good reason: the real narrative of British Muslim history includes those glorious and courageous episodes. It is a narrative that cannot be disputed (unlike the rather dubious assertions of Mohammed being a feminist and conservationist); it is a narrative to be proud of.

I find the labor force participation rate a lot more straightforward. It includes anyone over the age of 16 who has a job, whether permanent or temporary. The rate of participation declines as a population ages, of course. You can drill into the Bureau of Labor Statistics database for more details, but the overall picture is pretty bad.

At the end of 2008, it all went south in a hurry:

Labor force participation rates

The National Bureau of Economic Research nearly called the end of the recession as July 2009 at their April 2010 meeting, based on positive GDP reports, yet job losses are accelerating (unexpectedly). There is very little point in trying to stimulate the economy while making it less attractive to hire American workers. How long before someone in the Obama administration figures that out?

Just a couple more observations, based on this chart and some of the other things I found rummaging around in the data:

• The jobs lost in the 2000-2001 recession don’t seem to have ever come back. The percentage of people in the workforce stabilized, but never recovered. This time, it looks like the re-employment picture will be even worse.
• The biggest change in the rate since WW II was caused by the massive entry of women into the workforce (not shown in this chart). In the past few years, the rate of workforce participation for women has actually decreased slightly. Men’s employment picture is far more dire, but the change in women’s employment rate, while much smaller, is unprecedented.
• The Boomers are not retiring. Their workforce participation rate is well above forecast. Have you looked at your 401(k)?

Hmmmm,

We went 31 years without a major oil spill in the Gulf prior to Deepwater Horizon. Now we have a second explosion so soon. Meanwhile, some Greenpeace “direct action” types are attacking an oil rig off Greenland.

Hmmmm,

There’s no evidence of any human agency in either explosion. Still, when you look at the utter frothing hysteria directed against drilling and the oil industry in general, it’s pretty easy to imagine a group deciding that a little violence now will save a lot of lives later. After all, don’t environmental activists always tell us that they’re fighting for the survival of the entire earth and humanity itself? With such high stakes, it would be easy for someone to talk themselves into a “you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelet” rationalization.

Certainly, if the situation was reversed, the left would have no trouble using the same level of proof as evidence of nefarious plots by the right wing. After all, they think the right engineered a war that killed hundreds of thousands just to make a few bucks. Blaming the right for something like blowing up an oil rig would be chump change compared to that.

At present, the FBI considers ecoterrorists the most active domestic terrorist groups. It wouldn’t be much of a step from burning down buildings to blowing up oil rigs. With the resources and training that Greenpeace and other environmental groups have demonstrated they possess, they certainly have the physical ability to carry out such an attack.

Hmmmm,

We will have to wait and see I suppose. Even if sabotage was the cause it might be hard to prove with all the evidence thousands of meters below the sea. Still, you know the old axiom: Once is a fluke, twice is coincidence, three times…

[Update (2010-9-3 7:58am): From reading the comments, I think this post came out sounding more serious than I intended. I intended a more of a tongue-in-cheek tone to serve as a reminder of how easy it would be to see human agency in such events especially given the hysterical levels of leftwing rhetoric against the oil companies. We could eventually see the environmentalist version of the Weathermen if the hysteria continues.]

(Though, actually, the preferred graffito, not of course that I would ever recommend such a thing, and I most emphatically do not, is capital C, capital B, small z, with the bottom line of the z slashing rakishly off to the right. Nonetheless the enthusiasm of our many fans, however misguided this or that manifestation may be, is greatly appreciated. It is the spirit of the thing that counts.)

A recent CNN/Fortune Magazine story entitled “Bill Gates’ favorite teacher” told an amazing story of how one young man is revolutionizing the delivery of knowledge over the internet. The site and method is so successful that Bill Gates and venture capitalist John Doerr have snapped to attention at the growing phenomenon of the Khan Academy, an on-line school providing sequenced curricula on a wide range of content – all for free.

The first thing that should come to mind as you read the article is the massive potential value of Khan’s idea, not to mention the value of the 1000s of imitators and innovators who will build on the foundation that he has built. The next thing that we should all understand is the pointless waste of today’s overpriced and underperforming education system.

The infrastructure of the Internet, combined with the 10s of 1000s who can produce and encapsulate the world’s knowledge into 10 minute sequenced segments, has made the entire massive infrastructure of the current education system potentially obsolete overnight.

The existence of Khan Academy should force us to question everything about how we will educate the coming generations of Americans. Will we still need teachers? Yes, but far fewer than what we have now. We will also need to redefine the word ‘teacher’ way beyond the borders of today’s limited, union-defined monopoly.

Will we still need brick and mortar schools? Probably, but far fewer than the massively wasteful infrastructure we have now. Spend a few minutes on Khan Academy’s site, and you realize that an I-Pad, smart phone, or similar device, combined with a network of independent learning centers, could revolutionize education in less than a decade – all for a fraction of the cost.

Do we need to worry about how we measure Mr. Khan’s Academy? Not at all. All we really need to do is have society decide on a broad set of standards and find an efficient way to measure the acquisition of knowledge. Envision a near future where a child can walk into a licensed testing center and take a test on any given subject matter. If they pass the test, who cares how they acquired the knowledge?

Examples for rapid innovation abound.

This is a baby/bathwater situation. Our nation’s children, talented conveyors of content (Khan, dedicated teachers, etc.), and a rational, fair assessment process are the proverbial baby. Everything else (teachers unions, administration, buildings, bond dealers, school boards, textbook cartels, etc.) are the bathwater.

The only real question for policy makers should be how to best transition from the current bureaucratized “legacy” system to one where a dynamic array of content providers delivers the what your child needs to know at the moment your child needs to know it.

The best avenue to manage that transition is to have most (say 95%) of the education dollar follow the child and having the remaining 5% go toward developing standards and the method for measuring up to those standards.

It is time to question the meaning of the words “education reform” and the investment in reforming the current system. Once the automobile was invented, there was no need for “buggy whip reform” or “horse turnaround plans.” Mr. Khan, and those like him, have exposed the current system for the obsolete monopoly that it is. This article lays waste to the idea of “reforming” the current system. The best thing we can do is rapidly manage the transition to an entirely new education model.

Via Michelle Malkin, who notes that a Democratic Congressman has been circlating talking points about how great this administration’s support for Israel has been.

Meanwhile, Palestinian terrorists have murdered four more Israelis, right down the road from Daniel Jackson’s house.

“I happen to be opposed to gay marriage, but our peril is so great
that goes on the back burner,” Debbie Johnson of Georgia told me on
Saturday. Bruce Majors, a gay real-estate agent from Washington D.C.,
had a different take. He told me earlier this year that he felt
perfectly comfortable working with the Tea Party on bringing the size
of government under control. “We’re both about freedom and we have a
common short-term goal,” he said. Indeed, in Washington this past
weekend the more libertarian and the more socially conservative
elements of the Tea Party seemed to get along just fine.

From this, via Instapundit.

The Cold War was the glue that held the American Right together up to 1989.

Obama and the Democrats have become a domestic Soviet Union, politically.

They and all their evil works and their trillion-dollars-at-a-time cash bonfires are a menace so great that everything else has to be put off to the side.

These fools have scared the herd of cats on the Right into a tactical alliance that may (fingers crossed …) turn into a longer lasting realignment.

That is a perverse achievement.

I was in fact briefly in Afghanistan myself in the early ’70s, almost 40 years ago, before the Russian invasion and long after the “Empire” Brits had left, on something of an informal global pilgrimage. I have fond memories of visiting the great standing Buddha of Bamiyan, climbing the stairs behind him and looking out across the valley from atop his head. I had been reading the poet Jalaluddin Rumi in AJ Arberry’s translations for several years, and was aware that Balkh was Rumi’s birthplace — so Afghanistan already had a niche of sacred affection in my heart. And from that visit, brief as it was, I recall particularly a tiny white mosque by a spring in the middle of miles of desert somewhere east of Herat, with its luscious yet tiny garden, I remember the worn faces of old men in Kandahar and Kabul – I have in short, fond memories of the place, and therefore a sense both that some things change there, and some things stay the same.

According to Islamic belief, Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets, the last in the series — and what is left to those of us who wish to foresee Afghanistan or the world in 2050 is therefore “the long view”, guesswork, scenario planning, futurism, perhaps even science fiction. I have worn the “futurist” hat myself in the past — and even the science fiction beret, very briefly and without much success. From my POV here in 2010 and without even the benefit of 2020 vision, I see Afghanistan 2050 obscured by what Nassim Nicholas Taleb might call a veil of black swans – unexpected events leading to future world-lines we cannot as yet even imagine. Forty years ago, I had never even heard of a computer game. A version of Microsoft Flight Simulator was found in a Taliban safe house eight or ten years ago… and there are now US Army training games, jihadist games, and games of peace…

Let me clothe my speculations, then, in science fiction, openly presented as such, about “branching world-lines” and the ways in which possible futures branch out from the experienced present and often ill-remembered past… I’ll take Everett’s “Many-Worlds” theory as my framework, and throw in a very slight shift of the long pendulum – I see us backing away from the intensive cultivation of material goods and values which has characterized the last few centuries, and very gradually turning towards a more introspective, contemplative sense of the world and our place in it.

Oh – and I will use the names of some of my own mentors in place of the future thinkers whose work I quote, in a quiet tip of the hat to some previous exponents of the ideas I propose…

2050

Historians — on the world-line this is written from, and consequently in those cognate worldlines in which you are reading me — tend to date the by now (2050) clear shift in priorities (if not in actualization) currently emerging along these world-lines to the 2020 joint publication in Nature and Physical Review G of Dogen’s confirmation of the Everett-Klee Transformation Hypothesis, which stated (in its minimal formulation) that free choice is the mechanism by which a human individual switches tracks in a given “present moment” from a “past” world-line to a particular “future” world-line, branching “in that moment” from the first.

Gupta’s 2024 dissertation at the revived Nalanda University suggesting that “morality decisioning” (a horrible phrase, now thankfully forgotten) was the key to shifting from more suffering-dense, competitive and warlike to less suffering-dense, more collaborative and peaceable world-lines was quickly followed by the recognitions that meditative (Snyder, 2025) and liturgical (Hopkins, 2025) practices were among the most powerful methodologies, certainly complementing and perhaps even surpassing “good works” by considerable margins in widely repeated tests of “world-hopping” as the practice of side-stepping from one line to another came to be called.

By 2030, “play” (Hesse, Huizinga) and “dream” (Bateson, Rheingold) were understood to be crucial to culture and peacemaking respectively, and the process of revaluing human “progress” in light of “moral branching world-line theory” (mBWT) was well under way. It was not, however, until 2037 that Niebuhr and Arendt’s proposal of a method for the cross-pollination of world-lines gave scientific legitimacy to the notion of a sacrificial (”bodhisattvic”) choice to cross over from low-suffering pasts into more suffering-dense futures — with a view to “seeding” those more suffering-dense world-lines with hints of “liberation or salvation via moral and contemplative change”.

Afghanistan 2050

On those world-lines which derive from this “low-suffering / high liberation” end of the spectrum, therefore, a contemplative “immediacy in the moment” has given rise to a lowering of the sense of linguistic distinctions and analytic dominance over “what is” – and therefore such distinctions as the drawing of lines on maps have less sway than was previously the case – the Durand Line dividing “Afghanistan” from “Pakistan” being a case in point. It is now understood by most parties on these timelines that such administrative distinctions have an honorable and colorful place in the way the world works, but in no way trump the generosity of spirit that kin feels for kin. Thus we have Pashtun and Baloch spheres that cross Afghan and Pakistan borders (with similar cross weavings at other borders from Iran to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and even China).

The popular religion of the area still has strands of Deoband and even the influence of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, but affection for the Sufi poets and philosophers — for Ansari of Herat, Rumi of Balkh, and Rahman Baba — has grown or re-grown, along with increased interest in other religious and meditative traditions, the scholarly and tolerant Islam of al-Andalus and the Buddhism which was once native to Afghanistan not least among them.

Politics and sport are much the same as ever – and deeply intertwined. Buzkashi is still the national game and model for politics, horsemanship the mark of inherent nobility, and soccer the subtle international sport at which young boys in Afghanistan and the world over learn contest, collaboration, and respect for the skilled opponent.

There are, of course, other, darker world-lines, and daring souls who travel them, teaching peace in its many guises – as good business, good Islam, good Christianity, even good mental health. It is not easy for our historians to access them, for martyrdom of one kind or another, voluntarily chosen or egregiously inflicted, decimates those who would travel the realms of inflamed hatred. And there are even world-lines in which the world has already ended, not infrequently in some conflagration triggered by fervent believers that the end of time was overdue – self-fulfilling prophecy as maladaptive strategy. These world-lines cannot even be reached by historians – only inferred.

We, however, remain. Our futures are ours to make — and history, the arts and the sciences between them have shown us that a turning towards the good, the generous, the noble, the beautiful, and the true is possible.

And still our present branches into possible futures. And still with hearts and minds, we choose.

*

Charles Cameron is former Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University and Senior Analyst at The Arlington Institute. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and specializes in forensic theology with a particular interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes. He has also published poetry, professed anthropology and literature, and designed a family of games for lateral and creative thinkers. He presently guest-blogs almost regularly on Zenpundit. You can contact him as “hipbone” with the ISP “earthlink.net”.