Obama, according to Wall Street people who regularly deal with his economic and budget officials, is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.
When I was working on my book Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift, I read a work that Walter Lippmann, the co-founder of The New Republic, published in 1937. In it, with an eye to the New Deal, he observed that, while
the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words. . . .
Quite fortuitously, the Strategic Studies Institute has placed in the public domain a superb monograph by Justic Kelly and Mike Brennan on ALIEN: How Operational Art Devoured Strategy (september 2009).
We were all right then, we are still right now, but unless General James Jones, USMC gets himself a deputy that is grounded in strategy & integrity, this Administration is toast, in part because there is NO DIFFERENCE among the apparatchiks that trade places within the two-party system. They ae ALL out of touch with strategy, and hence reality.
How to distill the news? After watching it far too much the past nine months, I offer five random conclusions from what I think is going on in the age of Obama.
1. Disconnect
2. Abroad
3. Top and bottom
4. Getting Along
5. The Mother Polis
This is a “must read” that also includes an “Ironies Corner” worthy of reflection.
The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.
. . . . . . .
While no association between marijuana smoking and cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference this week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.
We are fascinated to see Mort Zuckerman bidding against Bloomberg the company for Business Week. He spoke to OSS '96 to great effect, and with Paul Strassmann has been one of our most dynamic speakers “jacked in” to the real world with real world bottom-line seriousness.
We admire all parties concerned, along with TIME Magazine and Forbes, and we dare to hope that whoever wins, they might try Systems Design & “Reverse Innovation,” two elements of this week's Business Week as issued in Europe.
Phi Beta Iota: First, tip of the hat to the New York Times for open persistent URLs. Bravo! We strongly recommend a reading of the entire pieceat the NYT website. Shame on the USA for not living up to the Founding Father's aspirations for a wise government and an engaged public. No one now working for the White House can recite the ten high-level threats, the twelve core policies that must be harmonized, or the eight demographic challengers–including China–who we should be helping devise the World Brain with embedded EarthGame. US voters are slow to anger, but that anger will rise in 2010 and crest in 2012.
Op-Ed Contributor: Eight Idas Behind China's Success
By ZHANG WEI-WEI, Published: September 30, 2009
EXTRACT: Critics of China like to claim that despite its economic success, the country has no “big ideas” to offer. But to this author, it is precisely big ideas that have shaped China’s dramatic rise. Here are eight such ideas:
