Cobb

The Anti-Science President

Might be Obama, depending upon his future rhetoric. Today new facts are in evidence.

Barely two hours ago--around 3:30 p.m., eastern time--an interceptor missile from the California base slammed into a target missile over the eastern Pacific Ocean. The test simulated the intercept of a long-range ballistic missile, like those being developed by North Korea and Iran.

Politically, today's test came at a particularly critical moment for the missile defense program. President-elect Barack Obama has voiced opposition to "unproven" missile defense systems, suggesting he may terminate them. The successful intercept provided a major boost for one of the key components of the missile defense shield, demonstrating the ability of ground-based interceptors to engage long-range ballistic threats.

The threat-representative missile was launched at 3:04 p.m. from Kodiak, Alaska, followed 19 minutes later by the interceptor missile. Over the next six minutes, the defensive missile maneuvered into the target's predicted orbit and delivered its kill vehicle, which destroyed the target missile.

Yay science!

The Return of Shinseki

Eric Shinseki is in the news. Obama is appointing him to head the VA. We haven't spent much time talking at Cobb about the particular angle that Shinseki did or did not play in the planning and execution of the Iraq War. All I can divine is that Shinseki said we needed a much bigger troop footprint in Iraq than Rumsfeld, and that Wolfowitz notoriously called Shinseki wildly mistaken. Wolfowitz subsequently backed off, saying he didn't know what he was talking about. I seem to recall that Shinseki marched off in a huff but has kept his mouth shut since then.

It can be suggested that Shinseki's entire objection to the Iraq War effort was vindicated by the successful redeployments known as the Surge. But what else are people likely to say?

You Know You're a Fanboy When

When you use fan terms to explain how you're not.

Shut Up Negro!

I found an interesting, but not particularly surprising exchange.

Subject: An American Troika

Hi folks,

I was just wondering why my post, An American Troika was removed. 

Please advise, if I have violated the rules I would like to know so I can

avoid doing so in the future.

Thank You and be Blessed,

digitalpublius

On Oct 22, 2008, at 12:08 AM, The Black Church Page wrote:

You did not violate any rules, your post was fine.  This is just a pro-Obama

site and we feel that we already have enough negative Obama

discusions [sic] going right now without having to add yet another one.

Nothing personal against you at all...the truth is...I am just ready for

this election to be over with.

The Black Church Page

And so DigitalPublius found me. I hope DP finds a comfortable pseud and joins us over here at Cobb, seeing that DP is a friend of LaShawn Barber. One can never have too many points of view, I reckon.

It's an interesting moment because I have decided to delete some name-calling out of the Birth Pains debate and close the comments. I was going to post this and then close the comments, but at the time I didn't think it worth the effort. I have been paying attention to some other rules about how some other blogs are dealing with flames and trolls and I'm getting my own sense of it. In the end, I am primarily concerned with the net weight of the threads in an historical context, and the extent to which Cobb is recognized as a sanctuary for genuine debate and honest inquiry or an echo chamber for noise.

I note that certain folks who used to come around are not around which pains me slightly. But I also note that other recent folks are a welcome addition.

As for the Negro angle, I think we will come to hear a great number of stories about black folks who feel particularly alienated over some of the more gratuitous idolatry, DP I think, provides a case in point.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Christian Liberals vs Christian Conservatives

Leaving atheists to the side for a moment, why is it that some Christians are liberals and some conservatives? Isn't Christianity singular enough philosophically to rule against being both? What of the overlap between them - how do Christians view those on the other side of the secular political fence?

The Lorite Interrogator

OK, I know I'm a geek, but most of the time I forget it because most of the time I don't have any other geeks to talk to, I get impatient and then I put on my conversational skin - which can be quite charming given enough bourbon. This evening in Columbus where it's 19 freaking degrees, I am hovelled up in my hotel room with Neal Stephenson's latest book and feeling geeky for the time being.

NS reminds me rather of the reasons I've always thought that the coolest job in the world would be to be a philosophy professor at Harvard. I've never told that to you have I? It's because I forgot and it's somewhat incongruous with my blogging skin. Be that as it may, I have been reminded that one of the things I've always wanted to build or see built was what I am now calling a 'Lorite Interrogator', which is essentially a factotum with an attitude, perhaps one of slight exasperation....

Since this afternoon I have been thinking of a way to come up with a cool name for the program that would express the Lorite Interrogation, and the answer that came to mind was unsatisfactory. That name was Fidel - which is, as everyone knows, the name of the Lurch-like but incredibly brainy assistant (who actually called himself a factotum) for Jack Nicholson's devlish character in 'The Witches of Eastwick'. Nor could I find an appropriate anagram for 'factotum' or 'lorite factotum' or 'bowen factotum'. But after this frustration I realized that I was making a mistake that a Lorite would point out to me.

Lorites, as you should know, are those people whose knowlege of philosophy and the history of philosophy would be sufficiently complete to give them the conceit of being able to prove that anyone's 'new' ideas were actually old ideas. And so a Lorite Interrogator would ask you several hundred questions and figure out if you were reasonably consistent in what you actually believe to be true about the world. A suitably advanced Lorite Interrogator could devine this accurately without asking so many questions, or by taking a sampling of your writing sufficient enough to nail you within a reasonable distance to some previously understood weltanschauung.

Such an algorithm, bot or facility in a system would be terribly useful in setting the odds for democratically elected candidates amongst populations of reasonably consistent thinkers. As such it would be rather valuable, and an interesting way to hack elections of sufficiently small size. At the very least, it would give candidates an edge. I had something of this in mind when considering the prospects for XRepublic, which is itself a rather old idea I came up with a decade ago, at least, I guess.

I've been considering learning Java for a variety of reasons. My current job may put me in a geeky enough position, long term, to accomplish that. I don't think that a Lorite Interrogator has ever been built, but it could start off as an expert system. Then again, I'm just happy about the idea itself. Now back to the book...

Anathem & The Market State

It is true that I have stopped reading 'Terror and Consent'. It isn't impenetrably dense, but it isn't much fun. Still the concept of the market state is appealing and frightening all at once - and it does loom large in the deep background of our notions of belonging and defense.

Along comes Neal Stephenson's Anathem which begins right at the start with a simple yet profound insight, which is something of a conceit and yet a powerful idea. What if there were such a thing as a super university, a space-age monastery, a bastion of civilization that had purposefully downscaled itself? At the moment in the book it is difficult to say with any accuracy how central to the fate of its planet this monastic bunch might be, but it does solve a number of interesting problems with which thoughtful people are concerned, and is part of a central theme in Stephenson's mind - if I read it correctly.

What do you do with real knowledge given that so few people bother to learn it appreciably?

The market state applies to this because once you have lost hold of an identity that protects everyone, you are hard pressed to enforce order. Jihadi terrorists seek to undermine faith in Western society and identity and therefore the center of power. They are using our open society against us. The market state might emerge as the result of a commitment of citizen to power if national identity is ultimately undermined by this conflict. You might have people saying with credibility at the end of such a war, that they sure as hell can't trust the US Navy, but Blackwater? You bet. Think of a gradual migration of tax revolters to survivalism - a benign and relatively comfortable survivalism - private schools, private security, private everything, but big enough so that it doesn't feel cult-like. Rather like The Big Ten Conference.

Imagine that instead of state governments we had smaller entities that worked in smaller federations with each other - that might be something like a market state. Americans certainly have enough trust in such private and semi-private entities that such an eventuality would not appear so far fetched, in certain ways. A market-state might be a sort of distributed society within a society which doesn't necessarily or overtly subvert the authority, but remains suffiently independent of it that it is basically sovereign.

Stephenson, being a science-fiction writer this time around, provokes such questions in his novel which is populated with youthful supermen I come to recognize rather like the characters of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The difference is that they don't seem, at least in this stage of the book, to have any sense of destiny - instead they are rather cheerfully odd, like the young wizards and witches of the Harry Potter series. But what they possess is not magic at all, rather The Discipline, a complete system of knowledge and behavior, nothing more or less than a religion. There is no God in this religion any more than there is a God of engineering or of biochemistry. There is simply the concerted effort to keep not only a purity of mind and spirit but of body as well. These characters appear to us as nothing more or less than what most American geeks want to be - with the great additional benefit of belonging to a fraternity which provides for the full spectrum of human need.

The process for admission into this 'mathic' world seems to be nothing greater than the willingness to abandon the outside world and make, at the bare minimum, a comittment of one year to hermetic life. Such a barrier might not be appropriate to an American concept of the market state - how many of us could submit to such a discipline? But we would certainly buy our families into such privatizing arrangements. What is appealing to Stephenson's monastic life is that it is completely organic - a society that evolved over thousands of years, much the way his phyles did in The Diamond Age.

But apart from the mathic society in Anathem, such market state groupings would represent a set of values that people would find attractive in society.

OK I'm going to quit now because this is rambly and I'm no longer interested in completeness. It's really cold here in Columbus and it's affecting my brain - ie I'd rather just read the book...which now at page 205 is feeling rather Harry Potteresque. In a good way.

Bulshytt

I have a feeling that Stephenson's new book, in which I am now deeply engaged, is going to be an excellent ride.

Get Rich Quick

DeLong asks the rhetorical (I hope) question, how the hell is Barack Obama going to fix all this. Him say:

The Obama administration is going to be rebuilding and reconstructing five major sectors of the American t. It has no choice--there is no other option. It has to remake:

• Autos
• Housing finance
• High finance
• Energy
• And the big one—health care

On what principles and through what procedures is this extraordinary exercise in structural economic reform policy going to be accomplished? I get how to do the macroeconomics of Obama administration economic policy. I don’t get how to do the structural side…

There's a reason he doesn't know how to 'do the structural side'. It's because Rome wasn't built in a day, and it didn't collapse in a day either. We evolved the problems that we have and they have pushed us into crisis. The sudden appearance of crisis is therefore illusury. It seems like somebody made a wrong turn off a cliff, but it was more like driving on balding tires on the edge for many miles. The result is a broken car and a long hike out of the woods. But nobody wants to seem to want to do the hiking. They want to call in an airlift, but you can't airlift all of GM. You can't airlift Citibank. They are on the slopes of Everest. If they're too big to fail aren't they also too big to rescue?

It seems to me that the problem with all of these problems is the idea that we can solve them in short order. The very presumption that what's wrong with America - the accumulation of long term dysfunctions that brought us to crisis, can be undone and set right is incompatible with the very concept of 'sustainability'.

I hear in this impatient desire all the requisites for revolution. We don't need a revolution. We need, maybe at least, to go without GM for a while.

The Obama administration is going to be rebuilding and reconstructing five major sectors of the American t. It has no choice--there is no other option. It has to remake:

• Autos
• Housing finance
• High finance
• Energy
• And the big one—health care

On what principles and through what procedures is this extraordinary exercise in structural economic reform policy going to be accomplished? I get how to do the macroeconomics of Obama administration economic policy. I don’t get how to do the structural side…

Andrew Sullivan's Ilk

It's too bad Sullivan doesn't have a middle name that starts with S. I could call him ASS without stretching any truths whatsoever. But I've taken a moment to spin around his toilet bowl because I'm trying to be consistent in participation over with TCoates at the Atlantic. Generally, I just wait for Patterico to slam him but this time I'm standing up. Quoth Sully.

And does anyone believe that it is a coincidence that the most homophobic racial group in America also has the highest rate of HIV transmission?

Drive-by slander doesn't generally get my attention. But I can't resist making an equally face-smacking counter charge which is that homosexuals are the most sexually perverted group in America and are the Typhoid Marys of sexually transmitted disease.

(breath)

Hmm. It didn't make me feel any better. But I can be certain that I've insulted a group with my labeling. And since I didn't elaborate I can say 'Hell it's just one sentence out of thousands of essays'. So for the record, I have no idea what I'm talking about in that sentence, despite the fact that I know somewhere somebody with a masters degree has put the right percentages in the right blanks and can assert the guts of it with scientific certainty. Suffice it to say that it is a mean spirited insult born out by common sense and incomplete googlewiki.

Homophobia is one of those things like racism that has overstayed its welcome as have the people who wear their obscure medals fighting it on their otherwise concave chests. Sullivan is identity politicker number one, or so he seems from my corner of the blogosphere, and thus wears his stinking badges and spewing off provocations with abandon.  It's how a lot of folks choose to deal with blacks as a group (or by watching 'The Wire'). His foray into the speculative world of statistical morality is rather predictable, tedious and foolish.

Grow up dude.

Birth Pains

Apparently Clarence Thomas is about to draw the ire of millions, and some massive fudge is going to happen or else all hell will break loose in America. He apparently has made the move that will force the Supreme Court to consider one of the several lawsuits over the birth of Barack Obama.

The provocateur in this matter is Leo Donofrio of New Jersey. Quoth he:

The main argument of my law suit alleges that since Obama was a British citizen - at birth - a fact he admits is true, then he cannot be a “natural born citizen”.  The word “born” has meaning.  It deals with the status of a presidential candidate “at birth”.  Obama had dual nationality at birth.  The status of the candidate at the time of the election is not as relevant to the provisions of the Constitution as is his status “at birth.”  If one is not “born” a natural born citizen, he can never be a natural born citizen.

Now of course the merits of the case may be simple and plain, and it must ultimately fall to the Court to decide, but the FEC has got to be something of a defendant here. They've certified his candidacy, so what's the deal? Anyway, Thomas is going to get the blame because his name is on the story - which is actually incorrect. Donofrio continues:

Furthermore, the case is scheduled for conference of all nine Justices, not eight. You should correct that.

And your reporting, which could have been complete with a simple phone call to the Public Information Office, is also deficient in that it wasn’t Justice Thomas alone who distributed the case for conference of December 5, 2008.  That was a decision taken after consideration of the full Court.

There are two docket entries for Nov. 19.  One of them shows that Justice Thomas referred the case to the full court.  The other indicates that the full court distributed the case for conference of Dec. 5. I suggest you call Patricia McCabe Estrada, Deputy Public Information Officer for the United States Supreme Court.  She will set you and your story straight.

As usual, the devil is in the details. Obama knows this which is why he has never been forthright in putting the matter to bed. This could get very very ugly.

The Neurotic Erotic

Guess who wrote this:

In our culture, sex has lost its sacred quality. If I were mayor or president, I think I would institute some rules for the good of the American Marriage, a prohibition or two — no touching allowed until Tuesday — because longing springs from distance. It is ironic but also absolutely understandable that proximity can kill sex faster than fainting.

You might guess as I suppose many people do, that this is something from the pen of a conservative man. It's not. It's from a woman of the sort I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. I'm sure that this essay is going around the 'sphere. Try to read it with your mouth closed. Then when you're finished, imagine that this woman were actually mayor or president and could institute such rules.

I've known a couple neurotic women and well, actually I've known several. Scary.

Are We Cool?

I'm reflecting on this reflection.

But you know what I’ve learned? Raising a boy, my son, scares the daylights out of me at times. I don’t know what he’s thinking most of the time. He has a great social maturity for his age and he is a studious and well thought of boy, but I don’t exactly know what makes him tick. Maybe it’s me. Maybe those schoolyard battles, those not so nice encounters with teachers and those feelings of awkwardness are what scare me about my son. I got through that maze called life due to some stroke of luck. How will my son get through it?

Men have to get through on strength, because there are few things as dangerous as a weak man.  But few things are as frightening as thinking your son might be stronger than you. I think every father has to inevitably face that possibility, and every good father has to prepare for that as an eventuality. The eventuality that the sort of power he has used over his son, will most likely be the sort with which the son will establish independence from the father - and the likelihood that the son will be more powerful.

I have listened to tales of this sort from all angles. But most familiar is the one in which middle aged men think about what they might have to do if and when their son does something that might get them in trouble with the law. Basically kick his ass. Show who's boss. Prove the old man has still got skills. I could go on about a specific black man's dynamic especially vis a vis pledging fraternities and being beat into and out of gangs, but the basic lesson is still there. There is a dominance and subordination dynamic at work with fathers and sons that we hope will both strengthen the son and mature into a respect of equals. And in the world of men, it basically boils down to a question of honor - who deserves a beatdown?

The gateway question: Are we cool?

This is the kind of question that exists on the border of IN vs OUT. It is a question of the weak man to the stronger man. It is a question that a father should ask the son in preparing the son for manhood. It is the question a son is always asking his father whether or not he speaks it aloud. It is the bottomless pit for the man who has no father. The man asking needs to know, now. The man being asked needs to respond now. If the answer is 'yes' then everyone goes his own way. The matter is settled. If the answer is 'no', prices and terms need to be explained.

A son needs to know if he is cool with his father and his father needs to be consistent and fair. I say this as if it were obvious, but it is one of those things we lose track of in our popular de-masculinized, relativistic culture where anything you can get away with is cool because.. well what difference does it make when everybody can 'do their own thing', or as I believe the popular term is 'do me'.

I say that the most dangerous thing in the world is a weak man, and I refer to my old suburban dad chestnut of soccer. When boys play soccer and there is a foul, they immediately get in each other's face and fight. The fight is over, and the next day they play again, the fight forgotten. When girls play soccer and there is a foul, there are tears and evil looks. The next year revenge is still being exacted. 'This is for what you did to my friend last season', is what a girl says. Such are the consequences of a failure to teach courage. Courage allows you to live in the moment - it is the single quality that enables swift justice.

Another way to look at this dynamic, aside from that classic scene in 'Pulp Fiction', is Chris Rock's admonition about how far to trust a man - as far as his options enable him. In all cases, a real man (yike I find I must say that) will try to get away with as much as possible, but he also wants to know that he is cool, if not with you, than with somebody who can apply the beatdown. Maybe only God.

A boy in a society of men, a man in the world, seeks his fortune and seeks to do all that he can - he wants to be free and he will use whatever strength or cunning he can muster to insure his survival in the world that is indifferent to his ego. And so he will explore and test every limit. This is a good thing, for without that there is no learning, no expansion of humanity, we'd all stay in the nest. A clever boy knows it is better to ask forgiveness rather than permission and so goes off on his way filling his pockets with rubberbands, coins, sticks, marbles and whatever he can get his dirty hands on. A man doesn't bother to ask always and everywhere what is going on in another man's mind - except when the rules are fuzzy and the limits are unclear. He just needs to know whether a man is good or bad, if he's going to need a beatdown for breaking the rules or not. It's all that simple.

My 14 year old son gets up at 5 in the morning and is out the door hours before I awake. He's off to wrestling practice and then band practice before his first class. So we don't speak at length on the daily. Last weekend we talked for a while - driving in the car to go get the holiday ham. He told me that his wrestling coach is not as strict a disciplinarian as his football coach. Within the short span of a dozen sentences I was able to communicate an entire set of manly lessons of character, and could see that he had internalized a good many already. We were both passing judgment on his coach and the other wrestlers, some seniors that he depends upon to help run the practices by discussing the nature of the competition and habits.

In order to be a man, it's all about what you do. The dynamic of dominance and subordination is a well-understood dynamic in power and respect relationships between men, between men and the rules, and thus between all of us in society, bound as we are by power and rules. Where a man fits in is a matter of honor and the guidelines for honor doesn't require a great deal of talk, not for men who understand it. It is part of the way we see things all the time, whether or not we speak about it at length.

Faith in Atheism

Imagine if God existed but was sufficiently advanced such that we couldn't identify him for another 1000 years. Where does that leave the scientific atheist? I know that CS Lewis has already gone through this exercise, but it would be interesting to discuss. That is what is the basis of the premise of atheist evangelism?

Christopher Hitchens went through this with Al Sharpton and others early this year or late last year, I can't remember which. Hitchens found a great deal to admire in Sharpton's apologetics. I wonder if most atheists measure up.

Question.
Does the atheist take the non-existence of God on faith?

Question.
Where does the non-existence of God place the locus of moral discernment? IE what human mental process is short-circuited when a faith-based morality is argued?

Question.
Do you see the problem here?

What About Saturn?

If you're like me, you remember that General Motors was saying that they were going to build a new car company from the ground up to compete with the Japanese. Roger Smith was the guy.

We in the computer business remember Roger Smith because he was the GM chair who understood the value of IT in the corporate world. He also recognized that GM stock was in the trash and so purchased Hughes Aerospace and created the GM E class stock which enabled Ross Perot's EDS. Smith, along with Citibank's Walter Wriston, was one of the real champions of the beginnings of the industry in which I now work - corporate IT management consulting. (Anybody out there from Centrobe?)

I've been listening to economists and one of them said that GM is one of the greatest money losing companies in American history. I think the phrase he used was 'capital destruction'. Saturn never escaped its orbit. So when I hear stories about how the UAW broke GM, I nod. But that can't be the whole story. Saturn was the brand new startup that bragged about its labor relations and the simplicity therein. But it obviously didn't do well enough to live on its own. Or did Saturn become a cash cow on a short leash? I don't know, and nobody is saying. But the presumption that a cash infusion or even a breakup and restart of GM might be the solution - well, I'm skeptical.

I suppose that I am globalist enough to not really care that my car is made by an American company. I've only owned one, a 1971 Ford Galaxie Custom out of all my cars. I can deal with watching a Korean TV and even a Chinese laptop.

Obama + Clinton + Gates = Bush - Doubt

It has been rather quiet, or perhaps I simply haven't paid much attention to the noise from the genuine Left and pacifists who are quickly realizing that they've been geopolitically bamboozled by the charms of Obama. Either way, so what? America's gotta do what America's gotta do.

For some time now, I have been keeping the spin of Thomas PM Barnett close to my ear, and in many ways the reformulation of the geopolitical face will have little bearing on the structure of the skeleton beneath. That is an American military skeleton whose bones have been broken, reset and reinforced by the Bush Administration, and it will be these bones that the Obama team will flesh out, walking with the same strides while appearing less strident.

In my archives vis a vis Obama and Barnett, I have several observations which appear with remarkably little dissent:

Obama The Neocon
Obama never once says that military force should be used only as a last resort. Rather, he insists that "no president should ever hesitate to use force -- unilaterally if necessary," not only "to protect ourselves . . . when we are attacked," but also to protect "our vital interests" when they are "imminently threatened." That's known as preemptive military action. It won't reassure those around the world who worry about letting an American president decide what a "vital interest" is and when it is "imminently threatened."

Nor will they be comforted to hear that "when we use force in situations other than self-defense, we should make every effort to garner the clear support and participation of others." Make every effort?

Conspicuously absent from Obama's discussion of the use of force are four words: United Nations Security Council.

The School of Schooling Obama
Now there was a time when I sidled up to Obama geopolitically and on the strength of Barnett's enthusiasm as someone who would straighten up and fly right if and when he got into the Oval Office. There has been little in his behavior to suggest otherwise since then. The fact is that the Right is invested in disbelieving him, and with Wright, they have their little race card. But I have always been interested to see how Obama and McCain debate foreign policy. Despite the fact that Samantha Power is out on her can for dubious reasons, Barnett remains convinced that Obama still has the team best equipped for dealing with the world as it is.

Petraeus Tail Wags the Obama Dog?
Barnett again reinforces his view that Obama would be a lot less likely to confront or countermand David Petraeus. This is a tough bit to swallow, and I wish I knew the entire scope of Barnett's Obama narrative, because the fact of the matter is that I like Petraeus more than I like McCain.

So here is where what I was saying about America under Bush continues to be the case with America under Obama:(emp new)

I dont' think we can much separate the goals of the Bush administrations favor with neoconservatism to the strategy and tactics applied by our forces in Iraq. Our forces are not pacifying Iraq by force, we are not arresting and detaining the male population and destroying the nation's ability to resist us. That's policy. Everybody admits that the Army has had to learn a new way to fight. Operation Iraqi Freedom is not merely a function of our military doing what it ordinarily does. Otherwise Somalia might be a different place today. So I don't buy the idea that American muscle in Sudan or any place else in the world would automatically be presenting us with humanitarian success.

In fact it was GW Bush's bold decision to use the US military in a long-term engagement in occupation and counter-insurgency that brings Americans to any hope of doing the world good. In previous administrations, American boots on the ground was not an option. Not in Desert Storm, not in Bosnia, not in Central America and not since Beirut and Vietnam. It has always been CIA Operations that has been used to try and achieve such geopolitical goals. CIA + Freedom Fighters. That's a mixed bag which is more spiders than candy.

The jury on neoconservative, proactive use of the US Military as an interventionist force is still out. It is why the Surge is so important. It's why Second Fallujah is so important. It's why Petraeus is so important. Victory in Iraq will embolden America to believe that its armed forces can topple dictatorships and lead towards democratic self-rule. Failure will mean war as usual.

David Brooks today echoes this through the 'sphere: (emp mine)

Some theoreticians may still talk about Platonic concepts like realism and neoconservatism, but the actual foreign policy doctrine of the future will be hammered out in a bottom-up process as the U.S. and its allies use their varied tools to build government capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, the Philippines and beyond. Grand strategists may imagine a new global architecture built at high-level summits, but the real global architecture of the future will emerge organically from these day-to-day nation-building operations.

During the campaign, Barack Obama embraced Gates’s language. During his press conference on Monday, he used all the right code words, speaking of integrating and rebalancing the nation’s foreign policy capacities. He nominated Hillary Clinton and James Jones, who have been champions of this approach, and retained Gates. Their cooperation on an integrated strategy might prevent some of the perennial feuding between the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom and the National Security Council.

Yes, Obama's challenge is to get 'er done. But his face and Hilary's face are just faces. If we geopolitical neocons are correct, then Obama's army is going to be Rumsfeld's army and the lessons of Petraeus will continue to be the guiding light on the way forward. If Obama is to take up the cudgels against the Least Favored Nations, then he must do so with the new Army that Rumsfeld has built and Petraeus has shaped.

Now if we can only get Clinton to take this suggestion seriously...

Glitch

This is really funny and sad and funny.

Please help! I took my husband's i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!

Obama Gonna What? - Least Favored Nation: 2009 Edition

I'm going to submit five countries onto the international shitlist in advance of Hilary Clinton. I pretty much know what she's likely to say but still, just in case she doesn't. The following are the nations who should be clutching their 'nads in fear of American aggression.

Sudan
Sudan has gotten away with murder. And mass rape. And genocide. And tyranny, and a bunch of other uncomfortable things for way too long. It has been on the back burner and in the public consciousness for many years. There's basically no reason whatsoever that Americans should, now that about half of us are not under the illusion that we are an evil empire any longer, restrain ourselves from acting like an evil empire where Sudan is concerned. All we need is the right movie with starring George Clooney, and we can make this happen.

Pakistan
Like Christopher Hitchens said today, India is our friend. India is our incredibly good friend and I want somebody in the Clinton -- oops, slipped there. Obama Administration to take the easy kudos for saying so and making a lot of noise about it. Those freakin' retarded muslims in the northern partition have been double dealing for a very long time, and now that Musharraf is out and Bhutto is dead, we can all pretend that there are no real friends in Pakistan and start acting buck wild.

North Korea
Because.

Somalia
Somalia has got it coming. We have been swatting the flies off of their distended bellies for decades and what thanks do we get besides a really cool movie with Tom Sizemore? God I love Tom Sizemore. Nothing. That's what we get, humiliation and a lot of psuedo-intellectual back talk. But the problem is that Susan Rice and Jendayi Frazer have been doing the right thing diplomatically to no avail. Now we've got pirates. That's right, good old fashioned cutthroats on the high seas. They need to be drowned, quick fast and in a hurry. The longer they stay out there, the more other loser countries are going to think they can get away with this same kind of nonsense.  Put 'em down.

By the way, where's Temple3?

Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe is trying to become the most disgustingly putrid economy in history. The inflation rate right now is somewhere around... well, put it this way. The price for everything doubles there every day. Economists are having to think of new ways of describing how awful the situation has become. So maybe we should just outsource their entire economy. Here's a new way for the US to become a non-violent aggressor. I mean while we're out there just buying every goddamned failed American bank, insurer and auto company, we might as well throw in a country or two. The only way in the world Robert Mugabe is going to be arrested is if he is a black man in America, so, make Zimbabwe American.

So that rounds out my semi-serious geopolitical strategy for BHO and HRC. When they touch base on those points, I will back them up. Otherwise, they're full of shit and should be ignored. As for Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, well GWB already owns those. Barack is just the relief pitcher. He might get the save, but he doesn't get the win. And if he loses, it's all his fault.

Bob Dylan, Seriously

I know about as much about Bob Dylan as my 11 year old daughter. Which is I can recognize two songs, maybe, and the rest of the time, not only do I not know what he was ever talking about, but I'm suspicious about the grasp on reality of anyone who ever did. I am inclined to think that Dylan was a guy who was determined to be disconnected from reality and spoke vague poetry - like an astrologer. Sooner or later there would be some nugget of truth in his oevre. But what what he really all about? Seriously. Is there any reader of Cobb who can put this guy into a recognizable context, or was he just as stoned as he appears to be?

American Sex

What is up with sex, and why is American sex different from other people's sex? Specifically, what have we done in marketing sex appeal into our consumer economy that changes what sex is, or what sex is supposed to be?

This is a monstrously huge question that we've touched on in the Weird Science thread, and maybe a little bit in dealing with the implications of Proposition Eight, but not really directly in terms of why sex matters as much as it does as a cultural phenomenon and what effect it has on the basic function of society.

Mark Steyn made quite a big deal about the birthrates of Muslims in Europe and how Scandinavians and Japanese are essentially dying out by not reproducing. When I was a kid, I came from a family of five, which was considered large but not huge. Now, the very idea of a professional with five kids is almost unthinkable, but one with two kids and one from a second marriage seems to be commonplace. We expect teenage girls and boys to be sexually active. Meaning what? How many times a week is normal, with how many partners? I came of age in the 70s when best selling advice came from Xaviera Hollander aka the 'Happy Hooker'. What of legal prostitution? San Francisco is going for it.

Speaking for myself I realized at the age of 10 that everybody is naked. I was helped by an issue of Playboy magazine which showed nurses and nuns and secretaries and schoolteachers. What resides in the sexual imagination today? What's left of it? With all of the pornography out there, is there any sexual imagination? What's the deal with safe sex?

How much should our sexual proclivities and orientations define us? Should that be political? Is sex easy or difficult - how much hesitation do we have making friendships sexual? It sex today as intimate as it used to be? Is it a sport or is it a sacred act? WTF?

The American Baseline Project

The first thing I'm going to do here is try something collaborative. It's going to be a Cobbler kind of thing and maybe we can cobble something reasonable together.

The Republican Party and any party has to be able to clearly communicate to the American people what they should expect from government - they need to refresh the basic covenant with the people. It is only based on these kind of objective baselines that we can say with any confidence whether we as American can be committed to our government agendas or if we should throw the bums out. Right now, it is my perception that 'consent of the governed' is getting short shrift and we feel that there's nothing to be done about it. So the natural inclination of the Left is to gather highly intelligent problem solvers, and the natural inclination of the Right is to gather highly moral patriots. These sets overlap, but neither are sufficient to deliver the promise of consent if they can become elected as the lesser of two evils with no objective regard to what government should be.

So I want to suggest that We the People aggregate some baseline expectations, department by department, issue by issue and then take off in tangential directions on which ideologies go which way on those baselines.

In other words, I'm thinking very seriously right now in turning Cobb into XRepublic, a collaborative enterprise of bottom up democracy.

Losers

I'm putting the GOP on notice, and from this moment forward, I see them as a bunch of losers. They have little to defend and now must, in some other fashion than reactionary derangement, show that they deserve the power and initiative they now do not possess. I have my ideas, and towards that end will be considering how to focus and get a handle on the kind of Conservative the Republican party most needs to be responsive to. I will try to describe what I think Americans need to hear from the Right.