(Though, actually, the preferred graffito, not of course that I would ever recommend such a thing, and I most emphatically do not, is capital C, capital B, small z, with the bottom line of the z slashing rakishly off to the right. Nonetheless the enthusiasm of our many fans, however misguided this or that manifestation may be, is greatly appreciated. It is the spirit of the thing that counts.)

Is America’s entire education infrastructure is a obsolete as the “buggy whip?” Is it possible that a short education story in Fortune Magazine and on CNN’s Money site will shake the foundations of America’s overpriced and underperforming education system? One can only hope.

A recent CNN/Fortune Magazine story entitled “Bill Gates’ favorite teacher” told an amazing story of how one young man is revolutionizing the delivery of knowledge over the internet. The site and method is so successful that Bill Gates and venture capitalist John Doerr have snapped to attention at the growing phenomenon of the Kahn Academy, an on-line school providing sequenced curricula on a wide range of content – all for free. Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. government is funding an ad campaign in Israel featuring billboards of Palestinian officials asking: “We are partners — what about you?” The Agency for International development “invested” $250,000 toward the billboards.

Via Michelle Malkin, who notes that a Democratic Congressman has been circlating talking points about how great this administration’s support for Israel has been.

Meanwhile, Palestinian terrorists have murdered four more Israelis, right down the road from Daniel Jackson’s house.

The Glenn Beck rally is confusing people.

Why?

He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.

Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral.

Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.

Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.

Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.

Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.

Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.

He is nuking out the foundations of the opposition’s moral preeminence, the very thing I proposed in this post.

Ronald Reagan said we would not defeat Communism, we would transcend it.

Beck is aiming to have America do the same thing to its decaying class of Overlords, transcend them.

Beck is prepping the battlefield for a generation-long battle.

He is that very American thing: A practical visionary.

See, simple.

Restore pride and confidence to your own side, and win the long game.

As Ronald Reagan also said, there are simple solutions, just no easy solutions.

God bless America.

UPDATE: One commenter, Richard40 who attended the rally said “As a conservative secular libertarian, I felt a bit left out … .” He said Beck could have included him by having a non-religious person on stage, and by saying “our only requirement is you believe in the founding principles of America, and wish to return to those principles.” He noted further, correctly in my view, that “The key to the Tea Party coalition is to stay unified on issues where conservatives and libertarians agree, like spending, deficit, size of government, and honest government, but allowing a big tent, that respects differences on social issues … .”

I did not go to the rally, I don’t know Glenn Beck, I don’t have a TV so I don’t know watch his show, and I am not a mind reader. So I can only speculate about this event. Other people have been a little bit stumped by it, too. I think that it was expressly not labelled as a Tea Party event. If so, that would make sense. The Tea Party is one circle on the Venn Diagram. The target audience for this event is an overlapping but not identical circle. The goal here seems to have been to encourage and mobilize one very large group of people, a huge segment of the population. No event is going to accomplish everything or appeal to everybody. Since the event included a call for forty days of prayer for the country, it was pretty obviously directed to people who pray. The totality of the coalition which is growing, which I think of as The Insurgency, is made up of several components. The unifying element is exactly the political and economic factors Richard40 mentions. A purely political event would have been a different event. There is room for all kinds of events.

And as a Roman Catholic, I will extend my hand to Richard40 and all other non-religious fellow citizens who share the same civic, political, economic and Constitutional principles I do. For the small number of doctrinaire libertarians who cannot stand dealing with someone who goes to church, I can only say, wake up, look hard at what is happening, and see who your real opponents are. We can have a civil discussion about the issues we disagree about when this current menace has been beaten back. We are in this thing together.

UPDATE II: Whoa. Mr Beck himself linked to this post, and tweeted: “The ONLY guy to actually get it!”

So, the accuracy of my penetrating analysis is confirmed.

Is the Internet the most groovy thing ever, or what?

He also mentioned his new news site The Blaze, which I am now going to look at … .

UPDATE III: Apparently Mr. Beck commented on this post on his radio show. If there is a link for that, I would appreciate it if someone would put it down in the comments.

“I happen to be opposed to gay marriage, but our peril is so great
that goes on the back burner,” Debbie Johnson of Georgia told me on
Saturday. Bruce Majors, a gay real-estate agent from Washington D.C.,
had a different take. He told me earlier this year that he felt
perfectly comfortable working with the Tea Party on bringing the size
of government under control. “We’re both about freedom and we have a
common short-term goal,” he said. Indeed, in Washington this past
weekend the more libertarian and the more socially conservative
elements of the Tea Party seemed to get along just fine.

From this, via Instapundit.

The Cold War was the glue that held the American Right together up to 1989.

Obama and the Democrats have become a domestic Soviet Union, politically.

They and all their evil works and their trillion-dollars-at-a-time cash bonfires are a menace so great that everything else has to be put off to the side.

These fools have scared the herd of cats on the Right into a tactical alliance that may (fingers crossed …) turn into a longer lasting realignment.

That is a perverse achievement.

You Westerners have your watches, but we Taliban have time.
 
 
—-
 
 
I am delighted to contribute to the Afghanistan 2050 discussion here on Chicago Boyz, back in 2010.

I was in fact briefly in Afghanistan myself in the early ’70s, almost 40 years ago, before the Russian invasion and long after the “Empire” Brits had left, on something of an informal global pilgrimage. I have fond memories of visiting the great standing Buddha of Bamiyan, climbing the stairs behind him and looking out across the valley from atop his head. I had been reading the poet Jalaluddin Rumi in AJ Arberry’s translations for several years, and was aware that Balkh was Rumi’s birthplace — so Afghanistan already had a niche of sacred affection in my heart. And from that visit, brief as it was, I recall particularly a tiny white mosque by a spring in the middle of miles of desert somewhere east of Herat, with its luscious yet tiny garden, I remember the worn faces of old men in Kandahar and Kabul – I have in short, fond memories of the place, and therefore a sense both that some things change there, and some things stay the same.

According to Islamic belief, Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets, the last in the series — and what is left to those of us who wish to foresee Afghanistan or the world in 2050 is therefore “the long view”, guesswork, scenario planning, futurism, perhaps even science fiction. I have worn the “futurist” hat myself in the past — and even the science fiction beret, very briefly and without much success. From my POV here in 2010 and without even the benefit of 2020 vision, I see Afghanistan 2050 obscured by what Nassim Nicholas Taleb might call a veil of black swans – unexpected events leading to future world-lines we cannot as yet even imagine. Forty years ago, I had never even heard of a computer game. A version of Microsoft Flight Simulator was found in a Taliban safe house eight or ten years ago… and there are now US Army training games, jihadist games, and games of peace…

Let me clothe my speculations, then, in science fiction, openly presented as such, about “branching world-lines” and the ways in which possible futures branch out from the experienced present and often ill-remembered past… I’ll take Everett’s “Many-Worlds” theory as my framework, and throw in a very slight shift of the long pendulum – I see us backing away from the intensive cultivation of material goods and values which has characterized the last few centuries, and very gradually turning towards a more introspective, contemplative sense of the world and our place in it.

Oh – and I will use the names of some of my own mentors in place of the future thinkers whose work I quote, in a quiet tip of the hat to some previous exponents of the ideas I propose…

2050

Historians — on the world-line this is written from, and consequently in those cognate worldlines in which you are reading me — tend to date the by now (2050) clear shift in priorities (if not in actualization) currently emerging along these world-lines to the 2020 joint publication in Nature and Physical Review G of Dogen’s confirmation of the Everett-Klee Transformation Hypothesis, which stated (in its minimal formulation) that free choice is the mechanism by which a human individual switches tracks in a given “present moment” from a “past” world-line to a particular “future” world-line, branching “in that moment” from the first.

Gupta’s 2024 dissertation at the revived Nalanda University suggesting that “morality decisioning” (a horrible phrase, now thankfully forgotten) was the key to shifting from more suffering-dense, competitive and warlike to less suffering-dense, more collaborative and peaceable world-lines was quickly followed by the recognitions that meditative (Snyder, 2025) and liturgical (Hopkins, 2025) practices were among the most powerful methodologies, certainly complementing and perhaps even surpassing “good works” by considerable margins in widely repeated tests of “world-hopping” as the practice of side-stepping from one line to another came to be called.

By 2030, “play” (Hesse, Huizinga) and “dream” (Bateson, Rheingold) were understood to be crucial to culture and peacemaking respectively, and the process of revaluing human “progress” in light of “moral branching world-line theory” (mBWT) was well under way. It was not, however, until 2037 that Niebuhr and Arendt’s proposal of a method for the cross-pollination of world-lines gave scientific legitimacy to the notion of a sacrificial (”bodhisattvic”) choice to cross over from low-suffering pasts into more suffering-dense futures — with a view to “seeding” those more suffering-dense world-lines with hints of “liberation or salvation via moral and contemplative change”.

Afghanistan 2050

On those world-lines which derive from this “low-suffering / high liberation” end of the spectrum, therefore, a contemplative “immediacy in the moment” has given rise to a lowering of the sense of linguistic distinctions and analytic dominance over “what is” – and therefore such distinctions as the drawing of lines on maps have less sway than was previously the case – the Durand Line dividing “Afghanistan” from “Pakistan” being a case in point. It is now understood by most parties on these timelines that such administrative distinctions have an honorable and colorful place in the way the world works, but in no way trump the generosity of spirit that kin feels for kin. Thus we have Pashtun and Baloch spheres that cross Afghan and Pakistan borders (with similar cross weavings at other borders from Iran to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and even China).

The popular religion of the area still has strands of Deoband and even the influence of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, but affection for the Sufi poets and philosophers — for Ansari of Herat, Rumi of Balkh, and Rahman Baba — has grown or re-grown, along with increased interest in other religious and meditative traditions, the scholarly and tolerant Islam of al-Andalus and the Buddhism which was once native to Afghanistan not least among them.

Politics and sport are much the same as ever – and deeply intertwined. Buzkashi is still the national game and model for politics, horsemanship the mark of inherent nobility, and soccer the subtle international sport at which young boys in Afghanistan and the world over learn contest, collaboration, and respect for the skilled opponent.

There are, of course, other, darker world-lines, and daring souls who travel them, teaching peace in its many guises – as good business, good Islam, good Christianity, even good mental health. It is not easy for our historians to access them, for martyrdom of one kind or another, voluntarily chosen or egregiously inflicted, decimates those who would travel the realms of inflamed hatred. And there are even world-lines in which the world has already ended, not infrequently in some conflagration triggered by fervent believers that the end of time was overdue – self-fulfilling prophecy as maladaptive strategy. These world-lines cannot even be reached by historians – only inferred.

We, however, remain. Our futures are ours to make — and history, the arts and the sciences between them have shown us that a turning towards the good, the generous, the noble, the beautiful, and the true is possible.

And still our present branches into possible futures. And still with hearts and minds, we choose.

*

Charles Cameron is former Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University and Senior Analyst at The Arlington Institute. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and specializes in forensic theology with a particular interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes. He has also published poetry, professed anthropology and literature, and designed a family of games for lateral and creative thinkers. He presently guest-blogs almost regularly on Zenpundit. You can contact him as “hipbone” with the ISP “earthlink.net”.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page today had a great little paragraph that pithily summed up a key economic and political concept:

“Obama and their economic coterie really believe that government spending can stimulate growth by triggering private “demand”, that tax rates are irrelevant to investment decisions, that waves of new regulation can be absorbed by business with little impact on costs or hiring, and that politicians can assail capitalists without having any effect on the movement of capital.”

Then the article goes on to compare this ‘recovery’ with the one after 1982-3 when the Gipper was in charge.

“Now taxes are poised to rise sharply… and Federal agencies are hassling business at every turn… now companies are sitting on something like $2 trillion, reluctant to take risks when they don’t know what new costs government might next impose on them.”

It actually is a bit worse than even the article portrays.  Companies don’t just choose when to invest in the US (to use that $2 trillion in cash), they choose WHETHER to invest in the US at ALL.  Nowadays the US has the least favorable tax climate of the developed world, and there are many other opportunities overseas where you can actually get plants built and have governments happy to work with you and welcome your investments with open arms.  Multinationals can do anything from anywhere and they are not stupid.  It is one thing to determine whether or not it is time to “pull out” of the US due to an onerous regulatory and tax regime (that is a tough call) – but it is a much easier call just to decide to invest much less incremental capital in the US and ride operations here as a “cash cow” instead, for the indefinite future.  That is what is happening en-masse today.

I recently posted my broodings about the American “Ruling Class”, in response to the much-discussed article by Angelo Codevilla on this theme. This post struck a nerve. It generated a huge number of comments, of exceptionally high quality.

I was very pleased to find out that Mark Levin discussed this post on his radio show. He begins that discussion at about 39:45. Mark says, “Lexington Green, though he may not know it, is writing about this show, and me.” He focuses on the idea that our would-be rulers should be mocked, that they should be disrespected, and that is precisely what he does. This is a strategy that he, and I, and many others, all agree about. I recall one sterling example: the roars of laughter when Gov. Palin mocked candidate Obama at the Republican convention, simply by telling the truth about him in a confident and humorous way. It was pure relief to have someone speak honestly about the man, it was like oxygen coming into a room full of toxic gas. The more of this the better, and the more it is done with humor and a sense of confidence in ourselves, the better for us personally (too much anger begins to degrade you, as I know myself) and the more effective we will be in convincing others.

I will have more on Codevilla’s theme, and the response to it, in one venue or another, going forward.

I rarely listen to talk radio, just because of the nature of my work and other commitments, so I am not a regular listener to Mark’s show. As a result, I only found out about this recently. I have his book sitting around here somewhere, but haven’t read it.

Many thanks to Mark Levin.

Here is another speculative scenario for the Afghanistan 2050 roundtable. It reflects themes in my August 13 post and is not inconsistent with my August 22 post:

The Black-Flag Wars of the 20s and 30s were so fraught with religious strife and devastation that by the 40s many people in the region were ready for new ways to look at the world. That’s one reason why the New Theory of Prophecy (NTP) and the movement that formed around it, the New Word Network (NWN), suddenly spread faster there than anywhere before.

 

NTP rested on a reaction in the Teens that too many people from too many religions, mostly in the Middle East, were claiming to act in God’s name, as His chosen people. NTP reaffirmed that Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammad were God’s prophets. What it rethought was why they all appeared in the Middle East, when God could have placed them anywhere in the world.

 

NTP hypothesized that if God had sent a prophet elsewhere, his Word might not have spread into the Middle East in due time, because its peoples were so extraordinarily tribal. Yet, this area was a crucial crossroads of world civilizations. Wiser, then, to put a prophet there, and have the Word spread out to the rest of the world. But with the first prophet, only his own tribe got the Word; it didn’t spread beyond them. With the second, the Word spread far outside, but not much more within the Middle East. With the third, the Word spread across the Middle East and farther around the world. But then, once again, too many people turned to claim they’d been chosen by this version of the Word and its prophet; they reverted to being extremely tribal, in ways that disparaged not only other peoples but even the first two prophets.

 

Against this background, NTP counseled all believers against taking God’s name in vain and claiming to be His singularly chosen people, while NWN developed a noöpolitik* strategy to ameliorate the tribalization of religion. To its credit, NWN helped undermine the appeal of Al Qaeda’s narrative in North America and Europe, and motivate the accords between Israel and Palestine in the Teens. But for the next two decades, conditions in South Asia fell prey to the millenarian Black Flag Momentum (BFM) and its belief that a new prophet was imminent.

 

BFM’s leaders disdained NWN and twisted the NTP to claim it meant a new prophet was bound to arise, this time for them. They’ve been wrong, and done wrong, for a quarter century — like past millenarian movements that provoked apocalyptic violence and always ended up losing. Now, conditions are finally too disastrous for even BFM and its allies to rationalize. NWN is fast gaining adherents in the region, helping people recover and reorganize. Rumors are still circulating about an imminent new prophet, but lately of one quite unlike what BFM and others had predicted — and that too is calming the region.

 

[Excerpt from Dawgo Skatts, “Chronicles of the New Word Network,” draft (last revised 02/30/50). Accepted for inclusion in NoöSpherica Quarterly (probably the Spring 2050 special issue on trends in religion). Still being edited for sensitivity.]

* For clarification of this information-strategy concept, see here.

As a long time member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I’m big on preventing Teachers Unions from destroying western civilization. Therefore, let me just say that I’m in for scrapping the entire overpriced, corrupt, and union-driven money laundering scheme we call public education. You should be in too.

Join Us! National School Choice Week from National School Choice Week on Vimeo.

Workers with specialized skills like electricians, carpenters and welders are in critically short supply in many large economies, a shortfall that marks another obstacle to the global economic recovery, according to a research paper by Manpower Inc. The study mentions an Ohio shipbuilder that had to bring in experienced workers from Mexico and Croatia and a French metal-parts maker that hired Manpower to find welders in Poland.

The paper blames the shortage in part on the “social stigma” assigned to skilled blue-collar work, and cites a poll finding that only one in 10 American teenagers see themselves in a blue-collar job as adults. (The proportion was even lower in Japan.)

Read the rest of this entry »

This guy you know:

He’s the winner. Through the efforts of Dumas, he found an unforeseen afterlife as a major literary and film villain who constantly twirled his mustache and plotted against a pesky Gascon and his indomitable friends.

This guy you don’t know:

He’s the loser. No Dumas or even his cheap Spanish equivalent found him worthy of commemoration.

Read the rest of this entry »

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered.
Forgive them anyway.
 
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.
 
If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies.
Succeed anyway.
 
If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you.
Be honest and sincere anyway.
 
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight.
Create anyway.
 
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.
 
The good you do today, will often be forgotten.
Do good anyway.
 
Give the best you have, and it will never be enough.
Give your best anyway.
 
In the final analysis, it is between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway.
 

August 26, 2010 is the 100th anniversary of Mother Teresa’s birth

(Alternate title: When Borders Need To Heal….)

When we got to the Southern Afghanistan-Balochistan camps the first thing we noticed was the quiet. Even more strange than the lines of donated tents, the numbers of people, and the bizarre floating appearance of the inflatable camp hospitals dotting the landscape, was the relative silence. This surprised us.

Inside the largest camp hospital we found the recovered bodies of the missing Afghan-Americans. A make-shift morgue had been arranged with each body properly tagged in a kind of digital tattoo ink that kept a running score of the date of death, body temperature and presumed cause of death. The previous group of traveling NGO physicians (our hospital ship was semi-stationed for the duration at Balochistan Port) had left a good set up. Above each body “hovered” a bodily representation – a CT/MRI compiled projection – so that the morgue had the appearance of something spectral and otherworldly, the souls of the dead afraid to leave, anxious to ensure the truth.

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To our readers here at Chicago Boyz – I am looking for some information about a tool. For those not in the know, I am the proud owner of a working hobby farm. We now have five cows, three horses, six chickens, three cats, and a partridge in a pear tree.

We are raising our cows on pasture grass and hay only, no grain. I have been noticing a lot of thistles and burdoc out there in the pastures and I hate looking at it. The burrs also cause problems with my cattle as the breed we are raising is Scottish Highlands and they have a lot of hair.

I have been contemplating going back to the future and buying a scythe to cut this crap down. I cut a bunch of burdoc with a hand snips and it was drudgery – from what I have read a scythe would be a great tool for me. Our pasture is very uneven with a lot of rocks and dips – not good for a mower. Also, I like to exercise so the actual work doesn’t scare me at all, and my obliques could use the work. On top of this we have electrified fence that is constantly being grounded by high grass/weeds so I would use the scythe for that maintenance as well.

My question is to all of our readers – have you ever used a scythe and is there a particular design that I should look for? Any particular blade style that would suit this sort of work better? Most that I have seen have adjustable handles on the snath (the snath is the long handle part) so that should make most models fit my six foot frame. Is there a better wood for the snath? I plan on purchasing a wetstone to sharpen the blade while working, as well as a peening jig to peen the blade when needed. Any comments/advice are appreciated, especially from some of our readers who may have actually used a scythe back in the day for hay harvesting.

We just got a new phone system here at work and while the system itself is great, I am less than impressed by the engineering of the headset. Check out this photo:
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The EPA has drafted a new set of regulations for emissions from industrial boilers, via imposition of “Maximum Achievable Control Technology.” The National Association of Manufacturers has raised serious concerns about the advisability of imposing these regulations, particularly at this point in time: a very detailed analysis is here

Industrial boiler regulation may sound like a pretty esoteric topic, but actually I think it is an important one, both in terms of tangible impact on the economy and in terms of what it symbolizes about the way we are heading as a society.

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