It's A Fraud All Right

7 federal prosecutors were fired during the Bush administration because they raised objections to wasting precious resources looking for voter fraud when they knew there was next to none. 

The rest of the Justice Dept looked.  At a cost of several tens of millions of dollars.  They found 30 cases.  Most of those were explained away by people who had completed a prison sentence, and then voting in a state where they couldn’t anymore.   Now, completing a prison sentence normally restores voting rights.  But for these former prisoners in the few states where voting rights disappear for good, some few people didn’t know that and attempted to vote.  30 people, out of 250 million.  So one has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than voter fraud happening.

Is there some evidence that I am missing?  Because unless I am, it appears that campaigns against “voter fraud,” campaigns manifesting as highly restrictive, obstructive, bureaucratic roadblocks that use “anti-voter fraud” as cover, appear to have a sinister motive.  As in taking away a person’s right to vote (Constitutional violation of a fundamental/foundational right).

Energy For Non-Reality and Little to None For Reality

There was a recent Korean study of people who played computer games more than 30 hours per week.  The subjects reported they couldn’t reduce their playing even though they wanted to.  When they were given an MRI while shown things that reminded them of the game, their brains had virtually the same reaction as drug addicts when shown something about their addictive drug. 

As psychologists and sociologists have been warning, to no avail, the country is awash in an epidemic of obsessive video gaming.

Neil Postman said over twenty-five years ago that we were going to amuse ourselves to death.  One of the questions I have, though, is: How much is the allure of virtual reality, and how much is the depressive outlook of so much of reality—that the society is offering little real opportunity, let alone truly exciting avenues, for what should be the up and coming?

The Boxer Who Never Took a Month Off to Rest, The Woodcutter Who Never Sharpened His Axe

Post World War 2 America inserted itself into every manner of international involvement, and that injecting of itself into center stage demanded much from a people and a society. 

The American people did not deliver, either domestically or internationally.   They remained in the main unengaged and uninterested, acquiescing to interventionist impulses of those they put in power and then promptly ceased vigilance on.

As strategies and strategists go, pretty much a failure.  The most they would get from a generous but unbiased grader is a D- or D, but that would be due more to lucky events and the inherent flaws of enemies than to forethought and will.

The US has blown the lull period.  Sure, in the Cold War.  But beyond that, especially, when so much money and effort should have been made to rest and recuperate and even advance.  Instead, we got bases, intervention, power projection, and general militarization, along with money funneled in effectively corrupt trainloads to defense, intelligence, “security,” etc. contractors.  We built navies and air forces that not only were largely effectively unused (and certainly not for vital American interests), but wouldn’t have been regardless, probably even if they had been the right type and amount (and they were neither).  We DO need a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) naval force for addressing piracy and keeping open the seas, but little else.  We MIGHT need a UNSC air force. 

There IS no perfect security.  Everything you do to make your country MORE secure militarily comes at a cost—a steep cost—to the very economic and social health that is the true power of your society. 

Can our Framers look any wiser?  Or we any more foolish?

Historians are not going to be kind…

Where did all the men go?

“I am tired of meeting BOYS who tell me what they think I need to hear, make and break promises, and aren’t ready for something serious.  If you are dealing with unrequited love, childhood anger, or emotional dismissiveness, stay away.  I have dealt with many people who carry baggage and seem to think it is okay to ‘put themselves out there.’  Two words…Get help.”

The above frustrated female poster to an online forum might at first appear to be singing the same dirge of frustration at males’ commitment avoidance as has been sung for many years.  But it’s a bit more involved than that.  On to the (or rather, an) analysis!

America men wait longer and longer to get married, on average, than they used to.  No longer are the majority of men married by their late 20s.  The reasons are likely complex, despite all the tie pullers on inflammatory radio who would have you believe in a (their) single cause. 

Yes, young men may have paid attention to how marriage has become in a culture that throws so much burden on the nuclear family and gives next to nothing in support of it.  Even when divorce hasn’t been the observed result of years of slogging, marriage may not look all that appealing, especially with the selfish undertone of the culture poisoning the well.  And that’s even without the observed woman or women being controlling, manipulative, or any of the other things examined previously in this forum, which would obviously throw a big negative bone into the mix.

That the young men (extended boys, really, in many cases) are often socially stunted, is in little dispute.  Whether it’s the proverbial “playing video games in their (indulgent) parents’ basements” for the same endless hours a drug junkie devotes , or other evasions of manliness and responsibility, socialization is lacking.  Without socialization, semi-isolation is too easy, especially with the pseudo-connectedness (and pseudo-reality) of the internet—and all amid a culture that seems to teach or at least okay manipulation, exploitation, and other things that poison honest relationships.

Their average testosterone has also taken a nosedive, and that only accentuates most of the problems.  Difficult to be the complete man when the very foundational hormone that both makes someone a man and drives nearly every aspect of physical and psychological make-up, is lower.  Add to that the atrocious nutritional quality of much food and drink, and it only magnifies the problem.

In the female-dominated social structure, men, married men especially, and fathers in particular, are portrayed as stupid, foolish, simple, malleable, etc.—the target of jokes in sitcoms, comedy routines, and real life.  THERE’s certainly some low bar expectations to live down to—or avoid altogether.  A lack of respect also gets reciprocated by the way.  You ladies who are wondering where the Mr. Darcy’s, and Noah’s, and others of romantic literature are—while your expectations may have perhaps always been a bit excessively magnified due to literature’s ideal portrayal, your chances are often slim of getting even a remote semblance if respect is missing from the cultural equation.

Economically, the real job prospects, and especially the exciting ones, have gone away for probably a majority of men in the culture.  Few things are more emasculating and depressing to a man than having his work identity gutted.  Evasion of the society that wants to give him no good options, or force him into poor ones, doesn’t look quite as completely irresponsible as it might have before considering that.  Even when he can find a job (FAR less than a certainty today), the chances of finding one at a livable wage (and mostly forget about one that can provide for two or more people) are much reduced.  And that he knows that he alone can’t care for a wife and children, does something to his psyche, probably unrealized.  If the women in Grapes of Wrath were looking at and testing their men to see if they’d given up, perhaps many young men today have—deep inside their psyches—given up before they start.

That there is a general underlying feeling of driftlessness, shallowness, off-the-track inertia in this culture only reinforces the problems exponentially.

William Bennett has a new book out (“The Book of Man”) about the demise of manliness.  It’s a start.  We need a discussion on it, and a whole lot of related subjects in this culture.
 
Are there other probable causes of the changes in young men’s behavior?  Certainly.  We may have barely scratched the surface.

Only the fact that the human pair-bond is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, chosen relationships around, keeps marriage in the running.

Pathetic Parties

We need only look at the payroll tax (Social Security) reduction political theater to see how intellectually and ethically bankrupt the two parties are:

First, the Democrats:  This reduction, which hurt the already hurting Social Security situation, was supposed to be a temporary, economically stimulating measure to put immediately spendable money into the hands of middle and lower class wage earners.  While perhaps not a gimmick in the aggregate, for most people it was gimmicky in their personal situations: per paycheck for most people, it didn’t amount to much (and not least because of the low average wages of most Americans these days).  But the Democrats play loose with figures and play games with appearances.  They trot out people/examples of the difference “$40 every two weeks” would make, and gloss over the fact that most of those that amount of money would make a difference to are NOT getting those amounts in tax reduction (they don’t make the “assumed” $50,000 wage).  They don’t make that amount of money because that is the top end of HOUSEHOLD average income—47% of individuals make less than $27,000 a year.  And now the Democrats, because they want to use it as a cudgel against the Republicans, have been portraying the reduction’s scheduled expiration as a tax HIKE by the Republicans (who did, admittedly, largely oppose it), something that looks bad for the party of no tax increases.   Lost in all this is any real concern for the supposed dear-child of the Democrats: Social Security’s financial viability.  Where is the responsible talk about RESTORING the funding level (which is, really, all the expiration of this temporary measure is)?  And how about Dems admitting that more “priming of the adrenaline pump” for the economy is not working all that well?  Not least because both Democratic and Republican administrations have been using that pump in good times and in bad.  The body is failing.  No concern for that.  Political games and political advantage are more important.

Now, the Republicans: The payroll tax reduction did not much interest them either personally (because they’re not on that system) or with their prime constituents (who get most of their money from dividends and capital gains).  And so they (along with their fuhrer, Grover Norquist) showed their hypocrisy by not only failing to oppose its expiration (which could be portrayed as favoring a tax increase, albeit a tax increase on people they mostly have abandoned), but actively working to kill the reduction .  Loud and insistent they (and Norquist) were when the Bush tax cuts were about to expire—loud and insistent that such a thing would amount to a grievous TAX INCREASE.  And so they held hostage at the time unemployment benefits and other things so that the Democrats and Obama would cave to their demands about the Bush tax cuts (which they did).  Then doing similar hostage holding things this time (apparently at the prompting of TEA party members of the House who are being hypocritical as well) about the payroll tax reduction.  Using a false smokescreen of SAYING they wanted to talk about a year long extension, not 2 months, when it was obvious to all players they had no interest in actually extending things for a year.  And also trying to couple it to a demand about the Keystone XL pipeline, an entirely separate matter (anything important enough to vote on should be voted on separately or never brought up—this is a particularly grievous problem in American politics).  Republicans showed their hypocrisy on this tax reduction largely by their silence: because it affects regular people, not largely them or theirs.  Showing that it’s not even ideology: they only really care about tax cuts for the wealthy.

Are they equally to blame?  Probably not.  The Republicans have been a great deal more twisted in their petty politics and servitude to the 1%.  But are the Democrats a viable alternative, independent of the 1%?  No.  It seems only a sustained, country-wide third party to radically remake over the system can change these ways.  A party that can’t be co-opted by one or both of the other parties.

Raq'd Ourselves

Saturday saw the last significant combat troops leave Iraq, bringing to a dithering and anti-climactic end major American ground involvement in Iraq. I won’t bring up how much we resemble the Roman wastage and pointlessness of nearly 2000 years ago. I’ll stick to more recent events.

As Chuck Hagel said in his Sept 11 column this year (about 9/11), we dramatically overreacted, overreached, and became so intellectually and morally lazy as to be easily manipulated by those with inordinately selfish agendas. We committed to foreign and domestic involvements far beyond our capacity to finance them, let alone whether they could have been successful policy (they almost certainly could not have been).

And now, trillions of dollars (which we didn’t have and had to largely borrow) and many thousands of scarred or lost lives later, we leave, with many Iraqis’ good riddance.

Can’t blame them. We f’d up their country’s economy and infrastructure, shoved them aside, inspired terrorism, and made possible heavy Iranian influence.

Because when it comes to foreign policy, we’re selfish, immature, morons. Others have told the story of how the trumped up march to war seems, now that we are a bit clearer, like corrupt madness emplaced by those who would in another era be called war criminals. Some others have chronicled how we blew the occupation, the transition, the sovereignty. Still others have told how financially corrupt we were, how much we enriched the companies of the national security apparatus, that at times their wealth enrichment seemed to be the ONLY real objective of our invasion.

Because, nope, there weren’t weapons of mass destruction. Our intelligence agencies may or may not have known that, but since they didn’t allow the regional experts to speak to power (and those powers would have ignored them even if they had), we overlooked the blatantly obvious: Saddam Hussein and Iraq had/have a historical arch-enemy—the Persians/Iranians. Saddam was wily and clever—too clever for his own good, it turns out, especially where it concerned arrogant, cowboy American neo-conservatives—in making the world think he had those weapons. But he needed the world to think that, not because of phantasmal “threats” to Israel, the US, and the West, but because he needed that regional power to the east to think that.

And we got rid of both the belief and the force behind that belief (and no, I shed no tears for SH or any of the murderous dictators of history). And what do we fear as too powerful now? Iran, of course.

Charles Krauthammer’s analysis of Iraq is primitive, parochial-partisan, and far off the mark: no one “lost” Iraq, as it was never “ours” to win. The Obama administration, for all its problems, did not “blow” it. A foreign occupying force had been there long enough, under arrogant and infuriating (to the Iraqis) circumstances. It was time to go. That’s why NATO, which had a far smaller and far more successful and Iraqi-respected mission there, also had to leave: the Iraqis had had enough of the West wanting special privileges—for their troops and their countries in general. Thank the heavens for the situation in Iraq that Al-Qaeda was such a bunch of murderous fanatics there. The Iraqi people found a semblance of common cause, and not only many former insurgents, but the civilian population also, turned on the terrorists. THAT’S the primary reason that the effectiveness of the terrorists there has been much reduced. A terrorism, btw, that did not exist prior to our invasion (Saddam had no connection to 9/11 or Al-Qaeda).

We seem unable to get it in our short-term, infantile foreign affairs skulls that petty modern dictators come and go with pathetic regularity. Human mortality ensures that they don’t last even when they can last a good while, and the descendants/successors of such dictators are usually either partially inept, or unable to deal with the forces that the tyranny of their predecessors have brought into volatility. If the desire for freedom is one of the strongest urges, why would we think such authoritarian systems would be long-term viable? John Adams once warned us not to “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” That goes a hundred-fold for petty ones.

In Lancelot’s words, “we have lost our way, Arthur.”

Such are the ways of hegemons. Obsessed with both the arrogance of their power, and their insatiable “need” for “security,” they spend themselves erecting shoddy, transitory structures on foreign lands. Structures doomed to collapse and fail because of faulty foundations—that the hegemons themselves have ensured are undermined.

Sure, the Iraqis have a big mess in front of them. Not only do they have to deal with the messes we left them (and the corruption we helped along—and it didn’t need much), but the possibility of sectarian warfare always looms, and they have to deal with their historical arch-enemy from a position of semi-supplicant weakness. Our hope is that they will eventually sort it out, and that the up and coming generations do not hold America responsible for too much. Then relations with the (historically) fairly secular Iraqis can begin at something near “normal.”

As for ourselves, to turn around a Churchill phrase: Once again, so much was expended, and so much risked, for so little. And so much damage done to others—and especially to ourselves. We are notably weaker because of this conflict we initiated. America will be done in if it keeps having historical amnesia and keeps involving itself in wars that serve neither true national interest nor the true interests of the international community.

This people and this culture are inherently complicit in this failure to ask insightful questions and demand hard answers. Lack of interest in history and politics keeps giving these results. We were the ones who were only too willing to march to war, to not think through to the end, to not ask enough questions, to utterly and arrogantly NOT seek to truly understand the actions of international actors.

Guess whose ass REALLY got kicked?

Channeling Eisenhower

The Framers’ reading of Roman history was correct, and their marked fear of, and guarding against, militarism was justified. If they were around today, they would remark that the limitations they put in place were not strong enough, and that Rome was being repeated. They knew that having large standing armed forces is a danger to both economy and democracy/the republic. It causes threats to be inflated or invented; it colors both perceptions and options in regards to international affairs; it breeds wars of aggression; it produces enemies from those who might be neutral or even friendly; it tempts its unwarranted use by policymakers; it obscures true self-defense and true national interest; it promotes and enriches selfish, corrupt, and connected individuals and organizations; it feeds, infuses, and justifies itself; it breeds non-producers and penalizes and weakens the producers, to the utter detriment of economic and social health; it drains vitally needed resources from the infrastructural and social needs of the society; it separates the population from the responsibility and involvement and meaningfully felt consequences of military actions taken; out of arrogant power, it fosters conflict instead of cooperation; as the social and economy society decays around it, it becomes the proficient and respected force that people look to for some sort of salvation, leading to further increase in its power; and its members, and especially its leaders, come gradually to both lose respect for civilian decision makers (and their authority), and to insert themselves further and further into the processes of politics.

America needs to shake off the obscuring hegemonic dust from its eyes, dust that is as old as WW2, and realize that it MUST both envision and make happen—soon—a much smaller standing military. Rather than structure itself for some nebulous “war on terrorism,” while simultaneously structuring for some big WW2/Cold War pan-conflict, and all the large forces that postulates, it needs to go in the opposite direction. It needs a very small, highly proficient force of special operations and related troops that can address the asymmetrical warfare likely, and leave to the National Guard (the militia; remember, those folks the Framers spoke of in the Constitution?) having cadres of specialized instructors and officers who can plan and provide for the possibility of needing to mobilize large numbers when true threats to the defense of the US and its true interests arise.

This would break the military-industrial complex, will lose some established expertise, and comes with it some risk. But the risk to continuing on our present course is no risk at all—it is certain self-decay and self-destruction.