中國

Tomorrow is the official 60th anniversary of the establishment of the "People's Republic of China", the Marxist/Maoist/socialist-communist/whatever-the-hell-it-is-now edition of the great Middle Kingdom

mighty cultural and economic power of Asia (and birthplace of my not-so-mighty little daughter, Maxine Shaomei, whose power is almost entirely composed of thermonuclear adorability - sorry, guys, had to get the plug in there somewhere...)

Having watched some of the last Summer Olympics, I'm sure the anniversary party will be quite a show...

But even in a digital age, there are times when I think that China is still perhaps the original riddle wrapped in a mystery surrounded by an enigma. Massive and complex, at times peculiarly weak, sometimes, and to some, frighteningly strong...it's worth considering the changes that the past 60 years have visited on it and its people.

While just floating around the Internets thinking about this, I came across this story over at China Bystander:

"...just after when Deng Xioaping turned his back on Mao’s revolution and launched the country on its present course of economic development. In the lobby of the Dong Fang Hotel in Guangzhou, just over the road from what we still then called the Canton Trade Fair, an elderly party cadre stood in tears. With his blue Mao suit and cap and weather beaten, careworn nut brown face he was the embodiment of the first 30 tumultuous years of the revolution. The cause of his tears, he said, was the installation of a one-armed bandit, the return of the pernicious evil of gambling, and the betrayal of all he had sacrificed his life for."

The next 60 years will have to be hard put to equal the past 60 for change. But we can be sure of this; change there will be, and throughout the change, China will be a force to be reckoned with across the world. Cliche, yes, I know. But it's hard to avoid that one. The Middle Kingdom is, well, in the midst of everything; its people in both numbers and human genius, it's political and economic power, it's position astride Asia. One can imagine many different futures for our own country, but it's hard to think of one in which China will not be a large part of it...Any thoughts?

(crossposted from Graphic Firing Table)

Parliment of Whores

Insurance, it seems to me, is a pretty simple thing.

The rationale for insurance is similar to the rationale for government; it's a way of using the strength of people as a group to help us do things we couldn't do as individuals.

So you get a bunch of people together and everybody kicks in a little. That little ends up being pretty big, because you've got a lot of people kicking in. And when one of the people has a problem: gets sick or hurt, house catches fire...or maybe gets a great idea, like buying another cow or expanding the widget plant...the group "kitty" kicks out a little money or a little extra help, so that the person can get back to being a productive citizen again, or make a little more and thus contribute a little more to the group.

People have been doing this since Sumer.

Now since then we've learned that for most of the truly "critical" parts of our lives, we've actually gone to the extent of bringing the actual government to do the insuring.

For example: we wouldn't trust the companies building airplanes and running airlines to verify their own safety inspections, or trust airports to coordinate their air traffic control with other airports and other private companies. So we have a Federal Aviation Administration that does all this.

We wouldn't trust private owners to build and maintain our roads and bridges, so we have state DOT's and the Federal Highway Administration to build them, inspect them and maintain them.

We've learned from experience that private for-profit companies have one duty; to make profits. This is not a bad thing - profits help these companies make better products, more cheaply, and get them into our hands in a timely way.

But profits can also be made by making shoddy, dangerous products, selling them as quickly as possible and then skipping town. Or lawyering up and beating the lawsuits. Or declaring bankruptcy. We've learned this the hard way, through potholed roads, failed bridges, burned toddlers, limbless workers. So where our health and safety is concerned, we usually take the approach "trust, but verify".

Insurance, whether it's auto, health, fire, or life, is an unusual sort of "business". An insurance company has no real capital investment; it has no "product line", no physical plant it cannot rent, no real assets other than the people that work for it and the records of those it insures. So when an insurance company makes a profit there is no chance that profit will be spend researching a better life insurance policy, designing a safer health insurance policy, or retooling the car insurance plant. That profit is, in fact, PURE profit, and can be used to pay the insurance company's owners, investors or workers, or used for some sort of financial transaction (like buying other companies...).

And an insurance company can only make money if it takes in more in premiums then it lays out in coverage. So if you take an insurance company and tell it to make more profit, it can do this only three ways:

1. It can charge more for its policies
2. It can pay less to its policyholders, or
3. It can keep the same receivable-payable balance and try and invest existing profits more shrewdly.

#1 is risky, since theoretically in a "free market" pricing too far above the mean will drive your customers to your competetors, and

#3 is difficult to manage - even the cleverest stock/bond brokers seldom make profits of the sort of scale possible if you work exceptionally hard at

#2: the real payoff for a smart company is figuring out how to chisel away at the payouts. It's a trick any smart carnie knows. You make the game just attractive enough to keep the rubes coming in...but hard enough so that they never get ahead of the House.

So insurance companies can - and many have - figure out how to make more money in the same ethical sense as the construction company taking a contract and then shorting the mix on the asphalt so that the pavement falls apart in a year instead of fifteen, or the garment outfit skimping on the fire-resistant material so that the kiddies' PJs go up like flash paper.

Many developed nations have figured this out.

And they've ALSO figured out that medical insurance is different from other forms of insurance. You can wear your seatbelt and drive defensively...you can put up smoke detectors and fireproof your house...but you can't change your genes to keep out cancer. You can't armor your tibia to prevent fracture.

Medical insurance is, by definition, the chanciest, most liable to fear, panic and irrational need of all the insurance varieties.

Medicine, too, is very vulnerable to the kind of profit-mining schemes that are attractive to insurance companies. When you're in pain, afraid, sick, you're not in a good position to make rational judgements. Especially now, with medicine increasingly complex and the workings of diagnosis and treatment opaque to the layman. The $40 dollar aspirin and the unneeded CAT scan are unlikely to be questioned by the battered character in the bed.

This is why almost all these other nations have taken steps to ensure that medical costs are controlled, and that insurance profits are limited. It's not "socialism" or some sort of strange, Euro-fashion need to put government in control. It's as simple as this:

Medicine and money are limited. Therefore there will ALWAYS be someone "standing between" you and all the medical care you want.

This person can be a third party, an agent of some government, whose primary interest is that you can be made sound as quickly and efficiently as possible so you can go back to paying taxes, or

It can be a private party whose profit depends on spending as little on you as possible, so unless you can be made sound for less than you've paid him you might as well die so he can write you off soonest.


Everyone seems to get this except the Democrats in the U.S. Congress and that entire portion of the U.S. public associated with the GOP.

The GOP has an excuse: they are morally and intellectually bankrupt, and utterly owned by the individual and corporate malefactors of great wealth whose sole purpose it is to keep the groundlings befuddled as they continue to reap largesse from the public purse.

But the Democrats..?

The rationale of the Democratic Party since the 1960's defection of the Slavery Wing to the GOP has supposedly been the welfare of the Little Guy; to look out for the weal of those of us NOT in a two-yacht family. And yet in the Senate yesterday the D's couldn't even keep their own party together to defend the central idea that insurance should be there to help people who are sick or injured and not enrich the healthy and wealthy.

To be middle-class - let alone poor - in the U.S. has always been to be relatively powerless, to have your fate determined by the powerful and the well-to-do. The genius of America has always been to convince these poor slobs that they're NOT just peasants, to keep them "inside the tent", and to prevent the fracturing of the nation on social or regional lines. Think about it - the entire New Deal wasn't a softhearted FDR wanting to cuddle to poor widdle urchins - it was the hardheaded dealmaking of an old patrician takig the elites that had just driven the U.S. economy into a ditch (sound familiar?) by the throat and pointing to flaming Red Russia and inquiring like a snarling Columbian cartel lord whether they wanted plombo o plata - lead from the angry mob or silver to keep the mob quiet?

The existence of a "liberal" wing of the more "liberal" of the two parties has kept a happy face on American poverty and a sexy veil on the impotence of the middle class for the hundred years since the Gilded Age, when Men were Men and poor people ate their own dead (screw 'em, if they weren't worthless why were they poor, then?).

The existence of that wing - or, at least, the ability of that wing to influence actual policy - seems increasingly fictional.

So my question is: what happens to a republic based on a powerfully representative parliment when that parliment demonstrates that it is packed with idiots and whores?

Why Isn't This Man Asst. Secretary of State for Middle Eastern Affairs?

Go read Andrew Bacevich's definitive essay on the non-moron Plan for Afghanistan.

Remined me again; why the hell are we still hearing from Kagans and Rickses and all those other idiots?

The man spells it out in two pages and makes total sense. If Obama's people can't see - and we won't make them see - that Bacevich's ideas are the only sensible way to proceed in the Paimirs, then we deserve everything we will get.

It's as least as good as most of the plans I've heard for COIN in Afghanistan...

Will Ferrel gets his Shrub on......and the suburb of Southern Pines will never be the same.

As a former 82nd paratrooper, I can only say that 2,000 wild monkeys would probably raise the cumulative GT score of, say, 2nd Brigade by 10%. At least. Fucking Falcon Brigade, like special ed only with more medals.

Objective and Subjective Causes of War

German troops outside of Warsaw, approx 21 September 1939

In strategic theory we say that war is influenced by the political conditions which define its nature. While subordination to objective politics and subjective policy is the rational element of war, it also consists (following Clausewitz) of irrational passion and uncertainty. War is thus a very unstable social activity.

The subjective causes of the war in question, World War II, are not debated much (that is besides by Patrick Buchanan), but one doesn't find much on the objective causes, that is the long-term political situation which was set up years before the Nazis took power in 1933.

In general, the pursuit of negative goals, that is, fighting for the complete or partial maintenance of the status quo, requires less expediture of forces of resources than the pursuit of positive goals, namely fighting for conquest and forward movement. It is easier to keep what you have than get something new. The weaker side will naturally go on the defensive.
These principles are obvious in both politics and the art of war, but only on the condition that the sides have a certain amount of stability and defensive capability in the status quo. In the same way that ocean waves grind the rocks on the shore against one another, historical conflict rounds off amorphous political formation, erodes boundries which are too sinuous and gives rise to the stability required for defensive capabilities.
However, sometimes this condition is absent. The Treaty of Versailles has filled the map of Europe with historical oddities. The class struggle has created a layer cake of different interests and factions on this map. In these conditions the pursuit of the negative goal of maintaining the status quo may be the weakest rather than the strongest form of waging war: sometimes a superiority of forces will be required for a defense rather that for an offensive, depriving the defensive of any meaning. . .

For centuries since the time of Cardinal Richelieu, French diplomatic thinking has been nurtured on the idea of creating conditions of fragmentation, open fields, and weaknesses in Europe. As a result of the work of French policy, whose ideas are expressed in the Versailles "Peace" Treaty, all of Central Europe - Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and so forth has been placed ina situation which completely rules out the possibility of defense and positional warfare. The French vassals have been skillfully placed in the position of a squirrel compelled to turn the threadmill of militarism. The art of French policy lies in the skillful creation of unstable situations. This is the reason for the impermanence of this creation. The idea behind the Versailles Treaty, putting Germany in an indefensible position, has made it physically necessary for Germany to prepare for offensive operations. Poland will stiall have the opportunity to ponder how it should thank France for the gift of the Polish Corridor, which has put Poland first in line for a German attack.

Aleksander Svechin, Strategy, pp 250-1, 1927

I would only point out that originally the German High Command after the First World War toyed with the idea of using guerrilla warfare to lure in the attacking allies and defeat them inside Germany. This was quickly rejected as impractical and unsuited to the German character and General von Seeckt proceeded to build a highly mobile and professional offensive force which would be able to attack Germany's enemies one by one and defeat them before they had mobilized their mass armies. All this within the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty which having been signed by Germany was the law of the land. So the political situation required offensive war against a surrounding hostile alliance, but forbad Germany the military to carry it out.

This offensive policy was supported by every Weimar government till the collapse of the Weimar system in 1932.

With France the center of gravity for the allied effort, Germany would be required to neutralize each of France's allies which bordered Germany - Czechslovakia, Poland and Belgium - before attacking France. After that a armistice could be decided upon with Britain. This was in fact the line of approach that Hitler took, which was part of his own plan for a war of conquest, but also followed the objective political conditions established in 1919.

So why did France decide on such a policy at the end of the First World War? It required the maintenance of a strong system of alliances with the new Central European states promising France a high level of influence and it tied the hands of the military to a policy which limited their options. The crisis came with the change in political leadership during the late 1920s and the construction of the Maginot Line starting in 1930. France did not have the resources to maintain the Versailles offensive strategy, and attempted to switch to a defensive strategy with heavy defenses, but the unstable political reality which the original policy had established remained. For this original strategy to have worked, the French would have had to have declared war on Germany in 1936 for entering the de-militarized Rheinland. Even when Germany attacked Poland, there was a great opportunity for France to attack in the west and clear the western bank of the Rhine which would have been a massive shock to the German people, whose support for Hitler's war in 1939 was lukewarm at best. . .

By their actions you will know the character of their soul

I once was a member of the Republican party, but then I grew the fuck up.
I apologize, let me rephrase that.
I once was a little boy with mommy issues, but then I realized that I’m the author of my own life, I am the decider of what I will believe, and whom I will believe.
And I believe that I am an adult now.
By being an adult I have come to realize that there are more important things in my life and in the lives of my family, my neighbors, my countrymen than my own self-interested wants and desires.
I realized that sometimes it is good to compromise, not because I’m a mindless lickspittle who has no spine, rather because for the good of us all Republican, Democrat, Independent, homosexually active, heterosexually active, stupid, genius, idiot, sage, man, woman…whatever, I am willing to compromise on those things that are good for us all.
Compromise does not mean you agree with the other persons world view, compromise means that you are willing accept a quid pro quo of each party surrendering a desire, a want, a demand so that everyone walks away with something, not everything, but something of what they wanted.
In contrast I’ve come to realize that the Republican Party is still a spoiled little child who wants, wants, wants and will pitch a tantrum in the Senate, the House, the streets, the neighborhoods just because they have a dime and the damn Democrats have a whole nickel.
I’ve also come to realize that a lot of the Republicans have sold themselves lock, stock and barrel to their patrons, which affects us on so many different levels it is beyond…belief…I…stunned that so many people in the Republican party would choose money over compassion, would eschew their humanity rather than the plight of the down trodden.
It was said of Reagan that he would give the shirt off his back to whomever asked him of it, and yet one just has to look at how he treated his children in order to realize that if he treated his own children in such a heartless manner what chance I of ever getting a shirt from him?
So, too, one can see that despite the claims of “compassionate conservatism” that words are cheap when compared to the willingness of the marketers to actually show compassion.
I speak of women.
But not just any woman, but rather all women who have been born the brunt of spousal abuse, or abuse from a love one…this goes to the core of the health care, but I think you can all see after you read this abhorrent article from the Huffington post that this should be a no-brainer, and yet…compassionate conservatism yields once again to the bottom line of their patrons.
I leave you with this article, whether you comment on it or not is your prerogative, but I am so disgusted with my country I…yeah…I’m going to stop here before I spew to much more.

A Question of Racism . . . and Easy Labels . . .

First a bit of bio . . .
I come from the "South" - Northeast Texas up close to the Arkansas border - and just returned from a trip back home recently. So as dyed in the wool as I am, I've also lived in Europe for over 20 years. Came over to fight the Cold War, got married to a "local" and stayed . . . which is the short version.

I grew up at the end of Jim Crow, experienced desegration as a Sixth grader, heard lots of old and horrific stories from old men (some of whom were ex-Klansmen) about the "good ole days".
We as children were taught by Southern matrons who attempted to keep the ideals of the South alive in us. Most of what they passed on to us was very positive, about service and responsibility. Also, I was taught as a child that Memorial Day was not "our memorial day" since it commemorated only Union losses . . .
Of course there was a noticeable thread of racism through the entire society, like a poison. Read William Faulkner to get more on that . . .
But I would add that the South today is nothing like that what it was growing up in the 1960s. My generation failed to carry on and transfer those old attitudes - both among Southern whites and blacks. To condemn the South as "racist" based on its history is to ignore that history and the changes that have taken place over the last 40 years.

What is far closer to the truth is that America is a racist society. We're very much into the pecking order view and living abroad brings that out. When you first meet other Americans in a foreign country, often the first topic of conversation goes to ethnic background and where you "fit in" . . . Any "redneck" or "Mexican" for example scores kinda low.

So how to explain “Joe” Wilson and his outburst?
There is an element of racism, but it is the same level of "cultural racism" present in the country as a whole. What Wilson's outburst brings out is actually something worse imo. More on that at the close.
What makes Obama a target is not his race, but the whole complexus of things he represents, perhaps the least of all is his race. Had Colin Powell been elected as the first black president on the GOP ticket, do you think we would be having this discussion? Why did Bill Clinton (arguably the most successful Southern president in US history) and Al Gore - both white Southerners - both get taken apart the way they did? Racism? What a hoot!
The radical right has been able to frame the political discussion in our country in very simple terms and have been attacking the legitimacy of Democratic political leaders for some time now. In terms of the nature of the attacks consider that Clinton was accused of murdering people, running drugs, "hanging coke spoons from the White House X-mas tree" and in the end was impeached for (you know the rest) . . . Al Gore was ludicrously tarred as a "serial liar" based on a series of lies propagated about him . . . former Alabama governor Siegelman is still sitting in prison on trumped up charges . . . and former NY governor Spitzer was targeted and brought down barely a month after having made very serious and substantive corruption charges against Bush's economic policies. If you believe that it was all about “hookers”, then you haven’t been paying attention . . .

These attacks are not about race, but about gaining, retaining and using absolute power, without even the fig leaf of any accountability.

What is really driving the anger and confusion in the South is that people there are overwhelmed with change. Much of the change has been positive, and people will admit that, but much is also very negative and economic-driven in various ways. Southerners feel that the country is going to the dogs and they are angry, but like the vast majority of Americans they are angry at the wrong people.
People have to lash out at something and "liberals" are the target that they have been conditioned to go after and see as the cause of their problems.
That "liberals" promote certain social issues that most Southerners find contrary to their values does not help the matter.

Finally, what made Joe Wilson's outburst so reprehensible imo was his target - the weakest social group in the US today - illegal immigrants - who do most of the heavy lifting in the US economy. What angered him and his followers was the possibility that this unofficial subclass might actually get a flu shot on the government dime. There is a growing anger in the South against this group, who essentially operate at the edge of our society. While they usually maintain those values most cherished by Southerners (religiosity, hard-work, family-orientation, frugality) they are at the same time perceived as not having to bare certain responsibilities. The most often heard complaint concerns auto accidents were the illegal (usually drunk in the story) is let go by the cops since he is illegal and shipped back home, the poor American "victim" having to shoulder all the damages. A version of this seemingly has become part of our national narrative.
The contradiction comes in when you point out to the "victims" that those same illegal workers are here due to "the system" that we have allowed to take root, keeping consumer prices low and gutting out worker benefits, that is their condition is due to our own lack of responsibility . . .
Had Joe Wilson really wanted to do something about the problem of illegal workers, he could have sponsored legislation imposing heavy fines on for instance the poultry and pork industries for hiring undocumented workers . . . not much chance of that though, which in my book makes Joe a gutless coward: first for attacking the weakest and second by not taking responsibility for a glaring problem that he seemingly acknowledges. Other than that his outburst was just the latest example of what the radical right has been doing in regards to Democratic political leaders for some time.
If there is any real "racism" present in this whole sorry episode, it is the deliberate exclusion of a politically and legally-marginalized group which is then systematically exploited for economic purposes: what could be argued to be our new "slave class" . . . but that exclusion is not limited to the Joe Wilsons . . .

But then any Democrat should know that.