It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
A Bitcoin wallet ID for me: 18YYkAMVyZVt6gzpZvBEF5RgsJ7aT7a8Yh
Bitcoin, the digital currency system, is starting to mature. As is always the case, maturity isn't based on age (weak correlation) or success level. It's based on experience. More specifically, maturity is based on how many difficulties the system overcomes. The greater or more fiendish the difficulties successfully navigated, the more maturation gained.
Few systems have been through meat grinder of experience as much as bitcoin. From the media to pundits/experts to (the) government to hackers to criminals. Even a bubble! Everyone has taken a shot at it. Despite all of this, it is still trading at around ~ $4. The software is getting better (there is encryption built into the desktop wallet now). The core system remains intact and unbroken despite a huge number of attacks.
Most importantly, people are starting to learn how to handle real/tangible digital cash. Handling digital cash, particularly lots of it, is serious business. It needs to be protected and you can't leave it in the care of anybody you don't trust.
Essentially, bitcoin has repeatedly proven that digital currencies can work in the wild.
NOTE: The most interesting us of bitcoin to me? If it was used as a PLATFORM for private currencies or publicly traded securities rather than as simply as a currency.
September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”
This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.
Phi Beta Iota: Full text with added links below the line. This review and the book are largely crap. Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights. The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam. Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops. In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.
First I met with Alexa O'Brien, one of the brilliant minds behind U.S. Day of Rage and its focus on Electoral Reform and non-violence as an absolute. [My memo that Fox news still has not read is here.]
Although they are also focused on a Constitutional Convention, as Lawrence Lessig has been, I reiterated the point that Electoral Reform is the one thing that can be demanded today (no later than 6 November, one year prior to Election Day), with severe consequences for every elected person if Congress fails to pass Electoral Reform by President's Day (February 2012), to include recall or impeachment, and camp-outs at their offices and in public spaces near their homes through to Election Day 2012.
In the below essay, famed Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, a veteran of both the Irgun and Knesset, a hero of the 1948 War and true Israeli patriot, paints a portrait of Israel's unfolding grand-strategic ruin.
While Israel's penchant for self destruction is self evident in Avnery's exposition, the extent of Israel's insanity becomes stunningly clear when Avnery's exposition is evaluated within the grand strategic framework evolved by the late American strategist Colonel John Boyd [which I have distributed before but am including again as Atch 2 for ease of comparison]. In foreign policy literature, the term of art “grand strategy' is used without explicit definition in vague often pompous sounding contexts. Part of the reason for this intellectual slipperiness, I think, is that the process of defining, or better, evolving a grand strategy is a creative one of synthesis; and the academy is notoriously poor in teaching or explaining synthesis, which is a messy creative process of trial and error conditioned by selection and reevaluation. One of Boyd's most important contributions in his theory of conflict is that he made the idea of grand strategy a precise concept intellectually that can be evaluated and understood analytically, at least after the fact. As you will see in the excercize below, analysis and evaluation is the easy part of grand strategy; the hard part, as Boyd also showed, is putting the pieces together (synthesis) to create a grand strategic course of action directed toward goals that improve a nation's (or any organism, for that matter) fitness to cope with the threats, constraints, and opportunities in its environment.
So, with this in mind, read Avnery's essay carefully, mark its crucial points, and then compare them to the criteria and argument laid out in my own essay, Chuck Spinney: Criteria for a Sensible Grand Strategy. Now ask yourself three questions:
Is Israel on a evolutionary pathway to ruin?
Is our blind obedience to Israel's policies good for Israel or is it reinforcing its pathway to ruin ?
And most importantly, is unquestioning obedience to Israel a sensible grand strategic course of action for the United States?
You will see that to ask these questions is to answer them. The first step in evolving a new course of action is to recognize that a course change is a necessity.
Chuck Spinney
Badalona, Catalunya (which some say is part of Spain)
AN OLD photo from World War I shows a company of German soldiers getting on the train on their way to the front. On the wall of the car somebody had scribbled: “viel Feind, viel Ehr” (“The more enemies, the more Honor”.)
In those days, at the very start of what was to be the First World War, country after country was declaring war on Germany. The spirit of the graffito reflected the hubris of the supreme commander, Kaiser Wilhelm, who relied on the war plan of the legendary German General Staff. It was indeed an excellent war plan, and as excellent war plans are apt to do, it started going awry right from the beginning.
The foolish Kaiser now has the heirs he deserves. Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, a former army Chief of Staff whose intelligence is below the average even of that rank, has announced that Israel could not possibly apologize to Turkey, even though its national interests may demand it, because it would hurt our “prestige”.
Many enemies, much prestige.
It seems that we shall soon run out of friends whom we can turn into enemies to gather even more prestige.
* * *
LAST WEEK a black cat came between Israel and its second best friend: Germany.
The Bush administration’s theory and practice of grand strategy could be summarized in the sound byte, “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists.” President Obama may have softened the rhetoric but his escalation of the targeted killing strategy by special forces teams and drones continues and escalates Mr. Bush’s preemptive mentality. The art of grand strategy is far more subtle than this, and it is now clear that Bush’s primitive conception led to all sorts of problems at home and abroad, which are likely to continue under Mr. Obama unless he changes course and evolves more constructive grand strategic course of action. Such a change involves an appeal to first principles, which begins with the question: What are the qualities make up a constructive grand strategy?
The late American strategist, Col John R. Boyd (USAF Ret – see bio) evolved five criteria for synthesizing and evaluating a nation's grand strategy. Boyd's brilliant theories of conflict are contained in his collections of briefings entitled a Discourse on Winning and Losing, which can be downloaded here. Here, I will briefly introduce the reader to what I will call Boyd's criteria for shaping a sensible grand strategy.
Author and former war correspondent for the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist 