Change is good
Think of this as Volume 17, Number 21 written since 1997. Enjoy.
The VA “Scandal” is considered one
of the biggest of the Obama Presidency. Commenters from Andrew
Sullivan to Jon Stewart bring it up constantly.
But the truth is that this isn't really a scandal at all. Not in the sense you're thinking, a deliberate theft of public funds by someone. It's scandalous, sure. But there's a difference.
At the heart of the scandal is the computing systems used by the military and the VA.
Think of this as Volume 17, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
The people who attended last week's NRA
convention, and the people who support them politically, engender a
wide range of emotions in those of us who don't share their ideology.
Fear. Loathing. Anger. In my case, rage and ridicule come quickly to mind.
But the most important, most effective emotion is not being deployed. It's the emotion that led Gandhi and Dr. King and even Jesus Christ to change humanity. It's almost never deployed against the greatest threat to life in our time.
Think of this as Volume 17, Number 18 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
One way to see the bend of political
history clearly is to look at the issue of law and order. (To the right, the original cast of the long-running NBC series.)
Americans have always favored law and order, and opposed movements that dismissed it. The Republican Party spent a generation hammering Democrats for being “soft on crime,” from Spiro Agnew sneering at the “nattering nabobs” who enabled student protests in the 1960s to George H.W. Bush and his “Willie Horton” ad in 1988. Democrats were only able to break through when they went “yeah-but” on law and order, as with Bill Clinton's support of “welfare reform” and harsh sentences for drug crimes.
Think of this as Volume 17, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
I have been following the copyright
wars since their inception, in 1997. I watched the passage of the
Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, and the No Electronic
Theft Act.
Both had a similar aim, to keep people from stealing making and re-selling copies of material subject to copyright, now that technology allowed for clean (or nearly clean) copies.
My sympathies here are purely with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and blogs like Boingboing, which hate these laws as attacks on freedom of speech, of association, and the free exchange of ideas.
Think of this as Volume 17, Number 10 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
The greatest threat to America now
comes from England.
Strange to say but hear me out.
The banksters' lair is the roughly one square-mile of central London known as “The City.” The country has become entirely dependent on profits from The City. Without The City, London fails, England fails, the UK fails.
A few thoughts in the wake of last
week's massacre.
Whether you call it “extreme gun ownership” or “gun fetishism,” the attitudes behind the mother who bought these weapons are common on the American right today.
Many people are struggling to put this new attitude into context, and explain it to foreigners, but my own writing gives you a frame.
These are hippies. And what happened last week, what is happening across the country as these incidents spiral, is very similar to what happened with the “leftist kids” in the wake of of 1968. Kid who'd been innocently tripping out on pot turned to harder stuff, they turned to cocaine and heroin. A lot of them died.
I will be on vacation next week and, in light of events decided y'all deserved an early present. So think of this as Volume 16, Number 34 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
The 1972 Game is about validation.
The second election after an existential crisis is about generational direction. Forward or back, future or past. And it always results in a resounding victory for the new way forward.
I didn't think until last week it was possible to get a decisive result out of 2012, what with the economy sputtering along so weakly.
But now it's possible.
Because in picking Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney picked the very embodiment of the ideas that failed my generation, and the antithesis of the Obama Thesis of Consensus.
Paul Ryan is a Randian theorist, someone who truly believes that those who can't make it should pound sand, that there is no such thing as an “entitlement” people can earn from government. He is the natural extension of Ronald Reagan's rhetoric.
Paul Ryan is Reaganism writ large, and I think he'd call that a compliment.
Which is the point. Any set of principles can become an -ism, and there is nothing more destructive than an -ism in power. The ideas of Karl Marx for an egalitarian society weren't that terrible. Communism sucked.
There is no magical -ism, no single set of principles that create the right policy for every age. There is only muddling along, making mistakes, and going forward.
At the time the U.S. Constitution was written, “guns” meant muskets, and militias were what made armies.
Muskets were inaccurate, even at close range. The states saw active militias as the only protection the central government would have against insurrection. This had just been proven, in Shays' Rebellion, an armed revolt against the government in Massachusetts. The Amendment wasn't written to enable such rebellions, but to put them down. As the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 would be put down, by militias under President Washington.
That's the real Second Amendment. It's not this “everyone gets as many guns as they want” nonsense the so-called National Rifle Association spouts. No matter how many judges or politicians may agree with them, that is just not the historical fact. It's a fiction, a lie, and those who write it are liars.
Think of this as Volume 16, Number 27 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
Of all the past crises in American history, today's has most in common with that of 1896 and the years following it.
In other words, we're playing the 1900 game.
As was true at the dawn of the progressive era, today's political argument is over a new economic order. The difference is that the rising tide of that era – mass production, scaled energy – is the falling tide of our time.
Of course that's not the way the other side sees it.
Oil's view is that the entire 20th century consisted of an insane set of mistakes, and their goal is to move us back to the “glory days” of the 1880s, a time when things like regulation, the social safety net, and government of the people rather than the oil-a-garchs had yet to be born.
Back when this guy was the face of American business. (To see him again, click for more.)
Think of this as Volume 16, Number 20 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
The eternal struggle in any capitalist system is between creditors and debtors.
For creditors it seems sisyphean. You make loans, you make money, but then debtors can take you out for a pittance through bankruptcy. That's the risk. You loan too aggressively and, just when you think you're about to take the pot, it's snatched away from you. Game over, start again.
What we need to understand is that countries and, in fact, the whole world, plays this game, and that not only does it not end but that it never should. Which means there has to be a way to re-start the game when the debtor cries uncle.
There has to be a method for national bankruptcy that re-starts growth.
Continue reading "The Eternal Struggle of Creditor and Debtor" »
Recent Comments