Cobb

Every once in a while, I hear some smartass evangelical atheist try to convince people that GWBush initiated some great religious fanatic foreign and domestic policy. I keep my head of course, and mostly I have kept quiet. But it's getting a little tiresome and at this point I feel that it is necessary to kill the myth that Bush was anti-science based on his opposition to embryonic stem cell research. 

Myth: Bush was against stem cell research.
Fact: Bush was against federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Research on existing lines of embryonic stem cells was never curtailed.

Myth: Bush opposed embryonic stem cell research because of religious reasons.
Fact: Bush opposed embryonic stem cell research for moral & ethical reasons. 

Myth: Embryonic stem cell research was promising.
Fact: It promised, but did not deliver. As of 2006, there were 76 proven therapies using adult stem cells and zero from embryonic stem cells.

Myth: We can never know what we might have gained.
Fact: The ban was reversed by Obama in 2009.

Myth: Now science can proceed.
Fact: Pluripotency in human adult stem cells was bio-engineered in 2007. The presumed reason to use embryonic stem cells was their pluripotency. 

Watching your kids play RPGs can give an interesting insight into their personalities, or at least their gaming personalities. I've noticed differences in our styles in Skyrim.

Sprite, who just turned 15 is a sneaky miser. She will not leave any piece of gold anywhere, no matter how much she has piled up. She is a level 14 Imperial and has just joined the Dark Brotherhood. She prefers using ranged weapons and will aim her bow forever before she releases the arrow. She has gone online to figure out every recipe for Alchemy. She tends to walk around with a lot of cash. She asks me all kinds of questions before she makes a move and has not ventured anywhere without knowing what's there first. She saves constantly and will not take any risk that she cannot undo and retry. Yes she's in the Theives Guild. She goes nowhere without Lydia, the Whiterun Housecarl, and generally does not fast travel. She almost never uses her shouts, and keeps lots of food on her.

Scholar, who is 16, is a paragon. She will not consort with daedra and gets mad at me when I do. She too is an Imperial and has joined the Legion. She has decided that Solitude is the best city and is saving 25000 in order to buy a house there. She is fine with the assassinations of the Dark Brotherhood and was the first one of us to join (she chose to kill the bad soldier). She prefers riding a horse to fast travel. When it comes to battle, she is all about heavy armor and two handed weapons. Just get it done. She's a clobberer. She prefers the miscellaneous quests and finds all kinds of interesting things to do. She has got shouts that none of us have heard of, like Kyne's Voice or something like that.

Boy is 17 and a gamer's gamer. So he games the game. He plays it like Modern Warfare - kill the enemy and move on. For him it's all about speed and progress. He's a High Elf and has a devastating One Arm. He has already taken over the Theive's Guild and claims to have a tremendous amount of money. He appropriately does not tell us his cheats, but has already found an (the?) Elder Scroll. He has no problems handling the machines in the Dwarven Ruins even though he's only Level 27. He is a Werewolf and loves beast mode, although I haven't seen him do it. He gathers every sprig and leave in Skyrim and keeps about 60 different potions on him at all times, never selling any of them. I think he's only doing the main quest, or quests he's found online that provide maximum rewards.

I'm a Level 34 Redguard specializing in Archery and Conjuration. I explore everywhere and do everything all at once. I'm the most likely to meet somebody in a town and already have the item the fulfills their quest. I spent 40 days as a vampire and hated it, coming to an insane conclusion which is a story in itself. I am mostly enjoying the metagame, considering what improvements have been made since Oblivion and am most impressed with the extent to which events between factions are more well thought out and consequential to the arc of the story. I'm in the Dark Brotherhood and intend to take it over. Almost never travel without a follower and I instantly conjure a dremora and an atronach when I meet a big enemy. I'm in the Blades and have brought three followers, and very much enjoy hunting dragons with the whole crew.   

The Empire distributes goods and services. The finest, the most plentiful, the most convenient. In return, you get to be a citizen of the Empire and are subject to its laws. The Empire is the only civilization on the planet. Everywhere else is... well. Nobarland. The Empire is The Grid. You live on it. It lives in you. Escape at your own peril.

I've written before about this phenomenon when I realized (but still can't manage to get it through my thick skull) that there very well may be a practically infinite upside to computing. That is to say whether or not we are accellerated by Moore's Law, we are going to keep building more and more huge systems, and keep expanding the economy of the digital revolution. 

I asked if it makes sense to consider that everybody wants to be loyal to democracy. The difference between global democracy and global empire is subtle, but I don't think that we in America recognize or care about that difference. In that regard we are all Wilsonian Neocons. We all want Doctors Without Borders, we all want Google Without Borders and we all want our cellphones to work everywhere and never drop a call. We want everyone in every country to stop polluting and stop greenhouse gas emissions. We want people everywhere to survive AIDS and breast cancer and floods and famine. And as our friendly neighborhood interlocutor DMG reminds us, we want to live on the Moon. 

None of that comes for free, except that if you live in America, you're already halfway there. If you don't live in America, we already know what you want because we are living in the future your leaders must promise you. I'll repeat that. If you are not living in America, know that we are living in the future your leaders must promise you. Because if they don't promise it to you, you'll just run across the border and get it here. You can do that, you know. With our doctors, and our Google, and our JP Morgan Chase and our AT&T. And you might call your cellphone provider Vodaphone or your Google Baidu, but underneath it's the same protocol. There's only a few ways to survive breast cancer and the protocols belong to the Empire. You must attend our Universities to learn it. There's no way you can do it on your own.

In fact the things you can do on your own off The Grid are dwindling in number and social significance. If you don't want Luxury, we already know where you're going to be. We call it Nobarland aka the Hobbsian Hell on Earth, where life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short'. Yeah that Hobbes. He knew it in 1651. 

I just wanted to remind you of all that. You see, there is this rather annoying presumption by our friends to the Left that America shouldn't be an Empire. But in fact it already is. It is the Empire of Western Civilization, and we're all Western now. 

There are several unstated implications of this desire for civilization and its various manifest destinies that have to do with law and military force that our liberal friends are loathe to admit. Which is why they would like to believe that there is nothing but seduction involved. Seduction is just marketing. You will be branded all the same. 

--

My interest in this looks to immigration and The Last ID, as well as XRepublic and public transparency.

From his OpEd in the NYTimes in its entirety.

By AYAD ALLAWI, OSAMA AL-NUJAIFI and RAFE AL-ESSAWI

Baghdad

IRAQ today stands on the brink of disaster. President Obama kept his campaign pledge to end the war here, but it has not ended the way anyone in Washington wanted. The prize, for which so many American soldiers believed they were fighting, was a functioning democratic and nonsectarian state. But Iraq is now moving in the opposite direction — toward a sectarian autocracy that carries with it the threat of devastating civil war.

Since Iraq’s 2010 election, we have witnessed the subordination of the state to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s Dawa party, the erosion of judicial independence, the intimidation of opponents and the dismantling of independent institutions intended to promote clean elections and combat corruption. All of this happened during the Arab Spring, while other countries were ousting dictators in favor of democracy. Iraq had a chance to demonstrate, for the first time in the modern Middle East, that political power could peacefully pass between political rivals following proper elections. Instead, it has become a battleground of sects, in which identity politics have crippled democratic development.

We are leaders of Iraqiya, the political coalition that won the most seats in the 2010 election and represents more than a quarter of all Iraqis. We do not think of ourselves as Sunni or Shiite, but as Iraqis, with a constituency spanning the entire country. We are now being hounded and threatened by Mr. Maliki, who is attempting to drive us out of Iraqi political life and create an authoritarian one-party state.

In the past few weeks, as the American military presence ended, another military force moved in to fill the void. Our homes and offices in Baghdad’s Green Zone were surrounded by Mr. Maliki’s security forces. He has laid siege to our party, and has done so with the blessing of a politicized judiciary and law enforcement system that have become virtual extensions of his personal office. He has accused Iraq’s vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, of terrorism; moved to fire Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq; and sought to investigate one of us, Rafe al-Essawi, for specious links to insurgents — all immediately after Mr. Maliki returned to Iraq from Washington, wrongly giving Iraqis the impression that he’d been given carte blanche by the United States to do so.

After Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. urged all parties to maintain a unity government on Dec. 16, Mr. Maliki threatened to form a government that completely excluded Iraqiya and other opposition voices. Meanwhile, Mr. Maliki is welcoming into the political process the Iranian-sponsored Shiite militia group Asaib Ahl al-Haq, whose leaders kidnapped and killed five American soldiers and murdered four British hostages in 2007.

It did not have to happen this way. The Iraqi people emerged from the bloody and painful transition after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime hoping for a brighter future. After the 2010 election, we felt there was a real opportunity to create a new Iraq that could be a model for the region. We needed the United States to protect the political process, to prevent violations of the Constitution and to help develop democratic institutions.

For the sake of stability, Iraqiya agreed to join the national unity government following a landmark power-sharing agreement reached a year ago in Erbil. However, for more than a year now Mr. Maliki has refused to implement this agreement, instead concentrating greater power in his own hands. As part of the Erbil agreement, one of us, Ayad Allawi, was designated to head a proposed policy council but declined this powerless appointment because Mr. Maliki refused to share any decision-making authority.

After the 2010 election, Mr. Maliki assumed the roles of minister of the interior, minister of defense and minister for national security. (He has since delegated the defense and national security portfolios to loyalists without parliamentary approval.) Unfortunately, the United States continued to support Mr. Maliki after he reneged on the Erbil agreement and strengthened security forces that operate without democratic oversight.

Ayad Allawi, leader of the Iraqiya coalition, was Iraq’s prime minister from 2004-5. Osama al-Nujaifi is the speaker of the Iraqi Parliament. Rafe al-Essawi is Iraq’s finance minister.

(Page 2 of 2)

Now America is working with Iraqis to convene another national conference to resolve the crisis. We welcome this step and are ready to resolve our problems peacefully, using the Erbil agreement as a starting point. But first, Mr. Maliki’s office must stop issuing directives to military units, making unilateral military appointments and seeking to influence the judiciary; his national security adviser must give up complete control over the Iraqi intelligence and national security agencies, which are supposed to be independent institutions but have become a virtual extension of Mr. Maliki’s Dawa party; and his Dawa loyalists must give up control of the security units that oversee the Green Zone and intimidate political opponents.

The United States must make clear that a power-sharing government is the only viable option for Iraq and that American support for Mr. Maliki is conditional on his fulfilling the Erbil agreement and dissolving the unconstitutional entities through which he now rules. Likewise, American assistance to Iraq’s army, police and intelligence services must be conditioned on those institutions being representative of the nation rather than one sect or party.

For years, we have sought a strategic partnership with America to help us build the Iraq of our dreams: a nationalist, liberal, secular country, with democratic institutions and a democratic culture. But the American withdrawal may leave us with the Iraq of our nightmares: a country in which a partisan military protects a sectarian, self-serving regime rather than the people or the Constitution; the judiciary kowtows to those in power; and the nation’s wealth is captured by a corrupt elite rather than invested in the development of the nation.

We are glad that your brave soldiers have made it home for the holidays and we wish them peace and happiness. But as Iraq once again teeters on the brink, we respectfully ask America’s leaders to understand that unconditional support for Mr. Maliki is pushing Iraq down the path to civil war.

Unless America acts rapidly to help create a successful unity government, Iraq is doomed.

Ayad Allawi, leader of the Iraqiya coalition, was Iraq’s prime minister from 2004-5. Osama al-Nujaifi is the speaker of the Iraqi Parliament. Rafe al-Essawi is Iraq’s finance minister.

When you campaigned in '07 to end the war without prejudice, all your supporters said "Yes we can!" Yes you did.  Proud?

Pops and I had an interesting discussion last night. It was mostly me talking and I think I said enough to begin writing. I expect that this subject will arise several times in the future, but it is something that puzzles me.

Why do people have faith in democratic institutions?

What the USA does not have is a "people's army". I am hard pressed to determine, should various institutions in America go broke, what it is that our peasants will be loyal to that is not essentially feudal. This begs the question of the tipping points of social unrest. 

We have a nation that works quite well when there is essentially full employment. When we're at 95-97% employed everything is fine. When it drops below 93% we all start to worry. But let's keep in mind what unemployment statistics are. 

Labor force measures are based on the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years old and over. Excluded are persons under 16 years of age, all persons confined to institutions such as nursing homes and prisons, and persons on active duty in the Armed Forces. As mentioned previously, the labor force is made up of the employed and the unemployed. The remainder—those who have no job and are not looking for one—are counted as "not in the labor force." Many who are not in the labor force are going to school or are retired. Family responsibilities keep others out of the labor force.

Last month, about 87 million Americans were outside of the labor force vs 240 million in it. So right away you know that only 64% of us are even working, in general. And 8.6% of those are out of work - unemployed. Not good. But look at it another way, which is the way I started my discussion. What if only half of the jobs out there are good jobs by thinking, reasoning people. IE, what if only half the people who are working, actually have a grip on reality and can think their way out of a paper bag? (which is to say NOT Ron Paul supporters). Aside from his nutcase, what I'm getting at is people who are more than merely functionally literate, who live examined lives according to a reasonable philosophy / doctrine. Whose ethics make sense and who live accordingly. How many of us are actually tested?  When we screw up how often does it actually matter? I'm saying - not enough.

So basically a third of us are the working clueful. And yet within that clueful class, we have a sizeable fraction of intelligent people who might say that America could stand never to fight another war. Or they might say corporations must be gutted to save the environment. Or they might say all government entitlements ought to be abolished. Or they might say we should dismantle the FDA. In other words - out of the  intelligent, working third of America we have a surfeit of opinions that, whether right or wrong are never going to be tested. And if so, it won't be our doing if they fail even though it might be our undoing. The doing would belong to those elite technocrats, whomever they are - the Slice, the demiurges of the The Man, who will pull the levers and flip the switches.  This is not only political, but cultural and religious as well. Surely there are theists and atheists who have decided to be their ethical lives on a number of premises that have never been proven nor disproven - they are never called into account until after death. Surely there are monogamists who never travel more than 50 miles from their birthplace in their lives convinced they have found the perfect mate as well as profligates who span the globe hopping from one sediction to another both types pretending to be as happy as humanly possible. 

In short there are millions of us who get through life thinking, yes but thinking in error, never to be disproven or called into account. What my reading of Stephen Pinker adds to this concept is the idea that we may very well have a surfeit of brainpower. In other words we are evolutionarily fit enough to survive our current environment and none of us will never truly be called into account for our survival because we only need 20% of our mental capacity to survive. Most of our thinking lives are thus bullshit and never need to be more than bullshit. And thus as a consequence we come to realize that.. hey if I had Steve Jobs' money I coulda designed the iPhone as well. If I had as much time on my hands as Lady Gaga, I could be just as famously ridiculous. All of us secretly know this. We didn't need to go to school for 20 years to do this $65,000 job. And so we have plenty of extra brain capacity for memorizing Seinfeld episodes, playing rotisserie baseball, perfecting our flycasting, redecorating the bathroom and hunting down the perfect combination of bags and shoes.

This is the way it's supposed to be. We enjoy our comfort in society and we prolong it as long as possible, because when the shit hits the fan we know the answer to 'should I stay or should I go'? The gallows focuses the mind. We laugh at people who trip running away from the monster because we know that doesn't happen in real life.  We break ranks, get out of our comfort zones and then start really thinking about survival and we survive. We survive famine, pestilance and war.  Always have. Since prehistory. 

So now I'm going to repeat one of of the questions that was percolating behind all of this from last week: 

..the fundamental question is whether or not multicultural nationalism actually works. Maybe it doesn't and we've only passed through an era of economic prosperity in which there was enough peasant work to go around such that it could be marketed as something more solid than it was. It's easy enough to sustain 'sensitive' marketing to consumers of all stripes. Whoever buys buys. But on the employment side, diversity is new. I happen to believe that rising expectations of American consumers may be unrealistic given the murky reality of where the bulk of the American economy goes forward from here. Whatever restructuring needs to occur in employment with more global competition may not sustain the overhead of affirmative actions past. 

So broaden what you think about 'affirmative actions past' to include everybody in the New Deal Coalition. What if every American who is not an entrepreneur is the functional equivalent of a renter? What if everything you think you possess, you actually don't, including your sense of right and wrong? That's because, my Peasant friend, you are not actually called on your bullshit thinking. You don't extend yourself out to life and death responsibility enough to even know if you are capable of making life and death decisions. You probably have a list of things as long as your arm that fit in the blank of "I couldn't ------ if my life depended on it." That's right. There is very little you could actually do if your life depended on it, but you can do enough to survive 8.6% unemployment and the otherwise cushy American lifestyle you are renting.

But if you really thought about it, you might begin to question why you are loyal to democracy? You have never been defended by the ACLU, but you would probably defend them. And you probably are still paying your college loans, but you defend higher education in general without having any clue whether the education you got and others get is actually worth it. And there are a host of democratic, public institutions you defend without having gotten, in your entire life, anything but rhetorical benefit from them. None of us have ever seen what it's like on the other side of the democratic institutional breakdown. And yet we discuss and debate abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration, some obscure medical coverage, some incremental taxation, some unbuilt pipeline, some arctic core samples, some diplomatic initiative to Yemen, some hunting habits of Alaskan women, some clauses in 250 year old documents as if our very survival depended on them. 

What has democracy ever really done for you that you couldn't do for yourself? And why the hell haven't you bothered to do it for yourself? What does democracy promise you and what does it deliver?

I know the answers to some of these questions. But I am of the opinion that we have more untested and unaccountable democracy than any large brained mammalian species needs. And we are starting to resemble creatures of that sort of artifice than our evolutionary path dictates. 

I do actually remember certain things very well. One of them was singing in the sixth grade in Miss Milliken's class. Our favorites were these four.

The Hiking Song | The Caisson Song | Joy to the World | I've Got Sixpence

I woke up this morning with the Hiking Song on my mind, but Google doesn't know it. 

Hiking through the fields we go
Eu ki dee Eu ki doe
Even through the ice and snow
Eu ki di ki doe 

In each season of the year
Hiking brings us health and cheer

Eu ki dee ki dee ki doe
Eu ki dee Eu ki doe

Eu ki dee ki dee ki doe
Eu ki dee ki doe

--

And one more little note as I read on in Stephen Pinker's 'Better Angels' and reflect sunnily on Niall Ferguson's killer apps. Civilization will continue to be civilized, and Western Culture will continue to prevail, as we go rolling, rolling home.

Or is it me?

May the eternal blessings of the God, the good will of good men and the spirit of the season find you and your family in health, serenity and prosperity today and throughout the new year.

Peace, Love & Soul from the Bowen Family
Boy, Scholar, The Spousal Unit, Sprite & Your Humble Servant.