RE BITING THE APPEASING AND GREEDY HANDS THAT FEED THEM

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2011/08/re-biting-hand-that-feeds-them-european.html

KERRY POPPINS

You saw it here, first, I suspect.

 

SOMEONE LIKES THESE OLD POSTS GREAT STUFF SOVEREIGNTY AT BAY LATER INVERSIONERS

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2011/10/re-multinational-corporation-term-david.html

 http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2011/07/re-david-kaisers-current-post.html

Boomers at the MNC top: 'When in Rome, do as the Romans;... the world is our oyster.' Vernon, Sovereignty At Bay

Precursors to the later party of Davos.

Terms search: trading American interests

audience today snapshot Rooskies back with a vengeance

Entry	Pageviews
Russia	21
United States	10
Germany	1
France	1
Italy	1

Kerry trying to bubble out India

To counter balance US now bubbled-out China.

 

Smart shopping.

Long been booming a bunch of would be Asian, and subcontinent, sumos, each getting ready to rumble. 

The rumble is not just an Asian rumble, however.

Whoever can stay out of it wins.

It will not define a new, objective, world understanding.

Forget sending the next Mary Kerry Poppins down, to sort things out.

CHINESE MUSLIMS FIGHTING IN IRAQ REUTERS

Good deal.

DUSTY'S GOT EM OUT BY TH COACH AGIN

Dusty's got the drop on a group of dudes out of the coach, by a dirt trail, and the Austrian economist there too. In a desert background cacti and tumbleweeds, a western style McMansion looms, nearby a sign reads KING RANCH.

Dusty, wearing red duster: "Shtick, em up dudes!"

Dudes, one with the word Scott, another with Perry, on his western leather shirt, in unison: "Sure pardner."

Dusty: "Gimme all yur sugar. I feed it to my horse."

Austrian economist: "No dice. Ai gif dat tu my whores, tu!"

Dusty plugs AE.
 
Dudes: "Fresh out. Hows bout some gol?"

Dusty: "Not today. Hasta la vista! I hate dudes, anyway!"

Terms search: Hung

RE INVERSIONERS

 Although the ostensible issue, re inversions, is merely federal income tax, the long sleeping giant in the room, for the average American, is state and local inplications, if any. 

However, since MNCs have long ceased to consider, or make economic arrangements with respect to, their state of incorporation, it has long been really politically mostly a moot issue, and thus I say 'if any' above.
 
Terms search: your state or local, 99 cent, Lorch, etc.

RE INVERSIONERS

Terms search: 99 cent stores, your state

RE 1984

" I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'facts' existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'Science'. There is only 'German Science', 'Jewish Science', etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened'--well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five--well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs--and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement." 1984 DK excerpt

Unfortunately, a war, even, won't get one automatically toward objective facts or truth. The old adage history was written by victors has some truth to it.  According to Orwell's reasoning, the last thing he would have said, were Hitler to have won, was that this German history was thus now historical truth.

Re scientific truth, as an objective standard, Stephen Goldman had some good lectures on the history of science, and its controversies,  within the context of European intellectual, mostly physical science and astronomy: "Science Wars", Teaching Company.

Re philosophy of social science, Winch had some useful essays, in Ethics and Action, struggling with problems of truth, method, and morality, through historical, scientific, and social transformation, what I would call, in one sense, a struggle for neutral scientific, and moral, explanations, across disciplines, academic and political factions, wars, civilizations even, and time, etc.,: "Man and Society In Hobbes And Rousseau", "Nature And Convention", "Witchcraft And Magic Among The Azande", "Understanding A Primitive Society",  etc., etc. Winch, of course, read and spoke both German and French; things which I, unfortunately, did  not.

Wikipedia: philosophy of social science, Peter Winch

Turkey huge today

Entry	Pageviews
United States	49
Turkey	21
Brazil	1
China	1
Poland	1
Venezuela	1

WALGREENS THE NEXT TAX INVERSIONER

The Party of Davos, goes for the cheapest domicile.

They, large corporations, have long had no patriotic territorial sense, even though the Supreme Court has come out calling them American person for some important purposes.

BBC RE IVY LEAGUE MISEDUCATION NON MERITOCRATIC ACADEMIC ZOMBIE FACTORIES

The Brit press loves to lambast the Americans.

Assuming they are right, still, an example of the Drew Pearson Fallacy, British media style.

He says not only is it not a meritocracy, which it is what it is touted to be, but in fact that it is nothing other than a zombie factory.

SEE DK CURRENT POST

This especially interesting observation re history, and history departments:

"Saddest of all, from my point of view, one of the ideas that Orwell cited as fashionable--that truthful history cannot be written--is now orthodoxy in most history departments." DK

This connects with comments I have made re the evils of disciplinary compartmentalization and specialization, and the notions of expertise and of experts, notions almost everyone has come more or less to accept, more or less blindly, in their everyday lives, partly from a kind of necessity generally, but also from gullibility, and from the many vulnerabilities of life in modern society.

Race, gender, and orientation history are just several obvious examples, some of which he cites, of this specialization, within the discipline of history.

One could list similar tendencies in many different disciplines of the social sciences. Sociology and psychology are classic examples. I think we even have things like gender and feminist economics now. And of course there is generational sociological history, or however one calls what S & H did.

Long ago, we started having things like ' area studies ', focusing on one particular culture, civilization, or group of countries.

The above observations were partly why I have found works which combine older and modern disciplines, histories of academic disciplines, and things like sociology of knowledge, philosophy of social and exact sciences, history of knowledge, history of ideas, anthropology of ideas, cultural history, social philosophy, economic history, political economy, ethics, moral philosophy, moral sciences, and which cut against the tendencies toward specialization, of particular interest.

ANOTHER KEY POINT RE WHO LOST HIS BUFFER THE CLASH WITHIN JUDAISM

The West, and its empires, lost, on their Western frontier, more than just their buffer, from us, the great despoiler of the western tradition.

Rather like Paul, within the Jewish tradition; the clash within, so to speak: Jesus had had no mission to the gentiles after all.  

(Don't take my word for it: E P Sanders, The Historical Figure Of Jesus.)  Paul, after Jesus, later, created one, clashed with the Jerusalem temple, and Jesus' brother even, over it. 

W, W Wilson, (Paul): 

"These principles are right for all people everywhere."

RE nyt WHEN MEDIA MERGERS LIMIT MORE THAN COMPETITION

GAME LONG OVER

Merely advanced, toothless, muckraking, going on now.

Smelling the Drew Pearson fallacy, guano underfoot.

It was seldom something, here, which it was going to pay the media, their only corporate criterion, to try to stop.

RE EU AH RE BREAKUPS

The 'take away' (take aways, by the way, are for dumbed down, informationally and culturally held back citizens, some might call them retards, the nyt, npr, news hour left liberal, Fox, Rush, right wing, crowds, both more or less similar, culturally):

Austria Hungary, Russia, broke up over WWI, why not also EU, over WWIV?

Breakup of AH, RE, bad things, break up EU, good thing.

Why, you will ask?

One question is, and was, who lost his buffer in WWII?

The other question is, what is a civilization really?
At its best, it is a civil society of sovereign nations.

RE WHY IS CHINA SO AGGRESSIVE SOUTH CHINA SEA LATELY

Think Neutrality Pact 1941.

 http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2013/02/its-all-good-russian-fighter-jets.html

RE BLUNDERING IN THE ORTHODOX WORLD

The US is a much bigger blunderer, over there, than, say, the Austro Hungarian Empire had been.

It was, after all, the assassination of the Arch Duke that precipitated WW I, so called.

WWI was started by the Catholic Austrians, and their rebelling Orthodox Serbs, against the Orthodox Russians, in the first instance, contrary to what almost all Americans believe, that it was started by the largely Protestant Germans.

As I recall, the fault line between Western and Eastern Europe runs down the middle of Ukraine:

 

RE PIKETTY CAPITAL INTRODUCTION

Page 1, he already shows off some deep misunderstandings, going in.

He trots out utilitarianism, from the French Revolution, in the opening quote. Social distinctions can be based on many other things besides wealth, or even common utility going back to Helvetian Enlightenment utilitarianism, a species of social and political theory based on self interest (But the French couldn't talk politics in the 17th Century.).

He thinks that democratic societies are based on meritocratic values. I wish they were, but they are not. See for example the short discussion in The Credential Society, and doubtless there are countless other works on the subject.

He tends to see his notion of capitalism itself as inherently identified with his notion of democracy, and thinks that an inherently democratic capitalism has been allowed to take over democracy itself, whereas capitalism is not necessarily identified with democracy, meritocratic or not.   

Braudel, for example considered that non democratic capitalism had existed at least since the middle ages I believe.  One of his books, I think, is called Civilization and Capitalism 1500 to 1800. His notion of capitalism thus also predates the Enlightenment by well over 100 years. 


On the other hand, were it, capitalist democracy, as Piketty describes, moreover,  he would then be in the classic liberal economists' trap, criticizing an outcome that laissez faire 'meritocratic' democratic capitalism itself has brought into being. On page 1 of the Introduction, he is already on the horns of a terrible dilemma.

RE GAME OVER SIMILAR POINT MONTGOMERY LATER MADE PATTON PATTERSON EISENHOWER

 See the discussion between Patton and Under Secretary of War Patterson, May 7 1945, The Patton Papers 1940-1945, p. 697.

If you happen to read this passage, then ask yourself: 'Whom do I believe, Patterson or Patton?'

See prior post, re whether to take Berlin, Patton Eisenhower.

See also: Drew Pearson
My favorite,  so far, is Jack Anderson (Pearson's partner), on Pearson, on Forrestal's death.

See also especially Soviet Japanese Neutrality Pact 1941.

RE ROBERT D KAPLAN OLD WORLD ORDER

This old darling wrote a story in Time several months ago.

He calls it geopolitics, and geography, and zero sum geography, rather than civilizational rivalries.

He won't admit the obvious, in that regard.  

A civilization is not reducible to geopolitics and geography.

Back when one was talking only about the West, and its balance of power, one cold talk about geopolitics and geography, within that Western civilizational framework, and one knew what one was referring to there.

With Kaplan, it is hide the ball punditry, really.

Scanned a review by Bacevich, who reviewed one of his older books; he wants a new Empire of the US, rather like Niall Ferguson in that way, just not a Western one. 

The US, you know, went rogue on the West, from the start.

audience today snapshot

Entry	Pageviews
United States	43
Ukraine	16
Switzerland	1
Netherlands	1

RE NYT GRAPHIC PHOTO SPURS MEDIA REFLECTION STORY

Drew Pearson Fallacy big time there.
'When the tabloids print it, it's smut; when we print it, it's sociology.

RE BBC GOOGLE BOOBLE

Google is itself becoming another big bubble, about to pop.

Let's call it Booble.

RE CHINA EMISSIONS

China was the great success story, behind the carbon credit story.

Great coup for environmentalist Democrats like Gore.

Booming China was previously of course Nixon's idea, and Kissinger's.

Call it Team Play.

RE INMATE GASPING AND SNORTING

Laissez faire government contract, PPP low bid. Not to worry.

RE NORWAY SYRIAN FIGHTERS COMING BACK HOME TO ROOST IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT

What's wrong with laissez faire now? What it always was.

Amour propre, back then, turned on itself, into amour-propre eclaire.

Why not just let those friskie Norwegian Muslim devils be?

Muslims or Christians, machine tools or twinkies, Russian missiles or others' missiles, a missile after all is a just a commodity, same as a twinkie, who cares who makes them where, or sells them where ever?

What matter, in a world which, if left, increasingly, to itself, or even if not even fully left to itself, always returns, eventually, to equilibrium?

BOTH GOOGLE AND MICROSOFT SITES ARE INFESTED WITH COSSTMINN POP UPS

Even uninstall pages.

Apparently Microsoft Security Essentials does not detect cosstminn virus as either a virus or as malware, but it functions as one.

referring urls myself and google only it seems

Referring URLs

Entry	Pageviews
http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/	1
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j

BASED ON VIEWS TODAY COSSTMINN VIRUS MAY COME VIA UKRAINE

Entry	Pageviews
Ukraine	8
United States	3

IT SEEMS OBVIOUS THAT COSSTMINN IS A MALWARE VIRUS MASQUERADING AS A GOOGLE EXTENSION

But then, when you think about it, not much difference, under the skin.

TRYING TO DELETE GOOGLE COSSTMINN EXTENSION WHICH INFESTS WITH THESE POP UPS

Cannot delete this extension it seems.

I get an ad, with a phone number, from cosstminn, that is a private LLP company, saying it can help with this Microsoft issue.

It's a google extension. Why shouldnt Google fix it, without me letting someone over the phone and internet go on the computer?

EXCERPTS 10 YEARS AFTER DK POST THE VITAL CENTER TRADING AMERICAN INTERESTS THE OTHER INCALCULABLE BLUNDER

People seem to like this old DK post, here are a few excerpts, re clash of civilizations:

"The Egyptian elections gave two Islamist parties, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, well over half the votes. Something similar has happened in Tunisia. The Egyptian brotherhood has announced that it opposes, for now at least, a coalition with the Salafists. But the significance of these developments remains enormous. A clash of civilizations looms on the horizon, because the momentum of western civilization has been halted, and then reversed, in the last half century.…Western civilization has been under attack from the left and the right here in the United States….A clash of civilizations looms because the hegemony of western civilization is now a thing of the past….Israel was created by secularists in the wake of the Second World War, when no one imagined what a role religion would play in the lives of those not yet born. It dreamed, apparently, of a relatively secular Middle East in which it could co-exist with its neighbors."

Yes.

I would just add that the West has most tellingly been under attack here, not either from the left, or from the right, as DK says, but rather from what has been called by, eg E J Dionne, The Vital Center, the bi partisan globalist consensus, especially in the last half century to which he refers.

Another very very important point, one I have referred to in posts, as 'the other incalculable blunder', was one Sir Michael Howard pointed out at various times, that the later decline of the West, after WWI, but especially at and after WWII, was the result of strictly American decision making. 

Basically, we got rid of Western Europe's civilizational empires such as they admittedly were, starting after WWI, taking over only what we felt like having, and then singlehandedly during and after WWII, left Eastern Europe under the control of an absolutist Orthodox Civilizational, lower class, merely ostensibly socialist (fit with FDR) , dictator, Stalin. 

One reason why someone like Field Marshall Montgomery, who had been in a position to know, and who (unlike Patton) survived the WWII debacle, pointed out that we had lost it to the Soviets.

' (Eisenhower:) "From a tactical point of view," he said, "it is highly inadvisable for the American Army to take Berlin and I hope political influence won't cause me to take the city. It has no tactical or strategic value and would place upon the American forces the burden of caring for thousands and thousands of Germans, displaced PERSONS and Allied prisoners of war." Patton was dismayed. "Ike, I don't see how you figure that out," he said. "We had better take Berlin, and quick-- and on to the Oder!" '

'...(Patton) again urged Eisenhower to take Berlin. It could be done, argued Patton, in forty-eight hours. "Well, who would want it?" Eisenhower asked. Patton paused, then put both hands on Eisenhower's shoulders and said "I think history will answer that question for you." ' Toland, The Last 100 Days, p 371.

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-other-incalculable-blunder-bigger.html

Terms search: vital center, trading American interests, bad divorce, before 1776.

RE POPULAR CULTURE AL CAPONE THE MEDIA LAW TAXES PROHIBITION CORRUPTION AND JAZZ

Program re Al Capone, especially illuminating were connections between Capone and the rise of popular culture mass media.

Especially good was the discussion of the relationship between crime and media coverage, both print, and the development of motion pictures, the Hays Code, etc.

The old NYT comment, re distinction between sensationalism in tabloids versus publication of the same story in the NYT:
'...when it's published there, it's smut, when we publish it, it's sociology.' 

The Drew Pearson fallacy writ large there. 

NYT REUTERS, Governor Cuomo's corruption commission, the Moreland Commission, different day, same issues, 'I control it.'

RE NYT FARM LAND INVESTMENTS

These present many of the same insurmountable underlying legal problems now long associated with home mortgage backed securities.

They are, after all, based also on securitized mortgages.

You cannot legally securitize a mortgage, really, especially a traditional one, governed, as almost all of them have been, more or less by each separate state's laws, 50 different states' property, and other related, laws.

RE LITVINENKO BBC DREW PEARSON FALLACY

Couple of things jump out at you. I have not followed this matter really.

He definitely was a spy.

He was killed, moreover, more or less publicly, in England, in a way which simultaneously uncovered him to have been a spy.

In a sense, then, he was outed, as he was killed.

It seems to me therefore that someone was sending a message by his death to others.

What other conclusions could one reach?

It would have been easy to have killed him privately, but that was not done.  

Patton, not a spy, you know, was privately killed, by 'truck', or rather, finished off secretly in hospital, after truck. 

No one, on either side, say three sides or more, then or later, wanted his death to be thought anything other than an unfortunate accident, except perhaps, only much later, Douglas Bazata, whose conscience bothered him, if one believes Target Patton. Question: what indicia of reliability should one attach to such an account, Wilcox's, especially re Bazata ?  Such indicia are well known. They have been used in biblical scholarship, and elsewhere, for decades.  Maybe someone more well versed than myself in these historical corroboration matters can address such questions. Re The Drew Pearson Fallacy in this connection, see Wikipedia Drew Pearson.
Here was Bazata's obituary:

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/22/world/douglas-dewitt-bazata-artist-and-oss-officer-dies-at-88.html

RE GIG'S FISH AND KEBAB HOUSE TOTTENHAM STREET WHITFIELD STREET LONDON

This was the site of a Greek kebab house, in the 70s, run at that time by exiled Greek Cypriot priests, of all things.

A lot of RADA people came in, as well as myself.

RE SPY SHIP AT RIMPAC BBC

Don't we have one there?

Why have, much less lead, such a disclosing dang drill like that in the first place, anyway?

RE MARKETS MORAL PHILOSOPHY THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND US

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2011/07/re-krugman-klein-keynes-markets.html

This was a great old post on laissez faire.

Reading The Rise Of Social Theory, brings to mind what economists and business theorists, and also myself, have long forgotten, that the Scottish and French Enlightenments largely, out of which these economic and commercial views emerged, were also in great part based originally, and only in part, on moral philosophy ideas. 

With disciplinary specialization, and compartmentalization, also treated in The Rise, these moral philosophy underpinnings gradually fell, were pruned, or withered, away, and also mostly disappeared between the interstices of the more diversified and ramified modern disciplines. 

This was why, for example, that Winch's book, The Idea Of A Social Science And Its Relation To Philosophy, was not happily received within other disciplines than philosophy, and even then, well received mainly within only the one camp of philosophy of social science itself. 

I will try to explain, at some point, how it was that moral philosophy, now largely extinct, nevertheless, back then, albeit as part of this larger multidisciplinary project in the 17th and 18th Centuries, took a wrong turn.

ANOTHER MEDIA FOIBLE RUSSIA FACEBOOK

They invested heavily early on.

They said they did so because, nyt, they admired his personality.

If you saw, and believe, the Facebook history movie, he has no personality, much, unfortunately (not his fault).

What do you believe?

PPP

FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND PRESS CONFRONTS PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS HEAD ON CHINA BUYS FORBES

Faux constitutional conflict.  Not the first time.

They have been one, freedom of speech and media property rights, under the skin, here, from the beginning.

The difference, now, is that it is an autocratic foreign regime buying media. 

Private property rights,  right? 

Like buying, or making, Twinkies, or machine tools, anywhere on the globe. Who should care where, or which, it is? Laissez faire economics at work.

Let me guess. Forbes will down size, and or off shore, say, 10,000 journalists (Microsoft just did 18,000 symbolic analysts etc) and other workers.

Join the Gilligan's Island off shored population.

Asians can do all this free speech press selling nonsense better, and cheaper, and with much better Asian management control regulation on Anti Asian content.

Japan did not put up with Japan bashing for very long here, either, long ago. They had a solution for that kind of freedom of press: it was partly overtly political, but also partly a so called market solution, similar to China's now.

As Thurston pointed out, in Boca, in 2006, 

"There are property rights, and then there are big property rights. Who do you think they will bail out, you or me?"

David Brooks dubbed another person Thurston Howell Romney, but that was in 2011 or 2012.

Say, didn't Romney earn that epithet by something he, also, said, somewhere down there, near Boca, too?

Anyway I have concluded that Brooks, nothing better to do that day than get yelled at by the editor, had read my blog some time in the prior year or so. Blog only started 2010.

BBC FORBES MEDIA SOLD TO CHINESE GROUP

Handwriting on the wall there.

The laissez faire free press, Drew Pearson Fallacy media, coming to an end, from another civilizational quarter.

Japan has also been really big in Western media, for decades now. Sony, etc.

PPP

SELFIE FOR THE DAY

Terms search: Maverick

BANKS ON CARPET DOLLAR DIPLOMACY REUTERS DREW PEARSON FALLACIES EU EXECUTIVE SELECTION MERITOCRACY ISSUE BUGBEAR

NOT THE RED CARPET.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/08/06/counterparties-you-fucking-americans-who-are-you-to-tell-us-that-we%E2%80%99re-not-going-to-deal-with-iranians/

These banks need more sanctions. An old article, but ongoing debacle.

Incidentally, a great example of the Drew Pearson Fallacy.

See also in that regard, the Reuters article on selection of EU executives. 

How do they, Reuters, know so much about it, if selection is so secret? 

And if they know so much about it, are they really so secret, especially among the cognoscenti?

And if they know so much about it, though they are secret, why complain about secrecy?

ALTHOUGH I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MAINLY A PHILOSOPHER AT HEART

my career was in one of the few areas which still, figuratively, remains of the Western chivalric tradition's notion of single combat, trial practice. 

However, trial practice here, in spite of some of its self serving rhetoric, has not been as exalted, or as pure, an ideal, as the chivalric ideal of yore.

Doubtless, some would add that the chivalric ideal itself never was what it once was, either.

There are also a few examples from sports and games, such as tennis or chess.

To see some connections among this and other themes here, terms search: team play, Rumpole.

RE OXFORD OR STRATFORD

I vote Oxford, without getting into the fiction that infests Anonymous.

eg:  http://www.deveresociety.co.uk/articles/NL-2011march-magri_veronesa.pdf

RE THE MYTH OF GENIUS ENTREPRENEURSHIP NYT DITTO HEAD

They must have read my blog......

Game over for the brilliant entrepreneurs, geniuses, Maverick executives, Nietzsche an executives, symbolic analysts.

They are a dime a dozen in the global marketplace.

Advanced credentials, of all types, ditto head.

The Global Credential Society of Davos

RE MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE CAN EACH BE GOOD OR BAD OR SOME OTHER THINGS

"Embarking upon the wrong war, I would suggest, is a bit like getting into a long-term relationship with the wrong person.  One can endlessly speculate about how things might have turned out differently, where they went wrong, and whether the other person might change, but in many cases, nothing can make up for that initial fundamental mistake.  So it was, in my opinion, in this case.  The collapse of the Iraqi Army in the northern part of the country, the fall of Mosul, and the establishment of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has led to a flood of recriminations directed against the Obama Administration.  If only the President had not cut and run too early, Republicans claim, none of this would have happened.  Others ask in amazement how the Iraqi Army upon which we spent so much money and which we supposedly "trained" for so many years could have collapsed so quickly.  No one--not even Dexter Filkins, who understands the weaknesses of the Malilki government as well as anyone--seems to be able to face the simple truth: that Americans have no means of making Iraqis become whom they want them to be, tolerant and mutually understanding citizens of an independent nation...."  DK (my underlining)

He makes some great points here.

I want to extend the analogy just a bit. 

Getting into the wrong kind of war, or marriage, can also, I think, be like getting into a bad divorce.

Not that I do not think there are good divorces severing bad marriages.

There can also be bad divorces, however, severing good or at least acceptable and proper marriages.

Good or bad, with regard to marriages, are also relative terms, I fear.

One such good proper or acceptable marriage, I would call it a good marriage as marriages of that type, back then, went, loose and arguably somewhat faithless as it was, a marriage of convenience even, or of obligation,  but a good marriage of convenience or obligation, as arranged marriages of convenience or obligation went, 

was that of Britain with its American colonies.

The divorce of 1776 I would therefore call a bad divorce of an otherwise good marriage.

Certainly, the divorcing colonists claimed, wrongly I would assert, that the grounds on which they sought divorce were violations of those sublime principles which only both lovers (along with other British Anglo colonies' marital ties to Britain), as only true lovers could, had shared.

"...I strongly suspect that if a Democrat wins in 2016 we may be threatened with the break-up of the nation....." DK

Sadly, if such a thing were to occur, I would look back and suggest that it is, in part, a consequence, and a vindication to some small extent, of the point I have made above regarding bad divorces, coming home to roost, 250 years later. 

Who cares, moreover, that other Anglo British colonies eventually broke away, as well? 

That too, may turn out, in the fullness of time, to have been a series of ill considered divorce developments.

A whole host of profound counter factual implications follow, had this bad divorce not back then occurred.

Terms search: Before 1776 

SEE KUWAIT WIKIPEDIA ONE OF THE NODES AROUND THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES

Apparently, Kuwait had been dominated by a Sunni merchant elite for centuries. 

Saddam Hussein was also a Sunni.

Had he been asked by his Kuwaiti coreligionist brethren to kindly annex their principality, for their mutual reasons, and if so, then why not?

RE IRAQ WAR A REPUBLICAN WAR

"We will never know how politics would have been different in the Middle East if the Bush Administration had not invaded Iraq. The evidence from Egypt and Syria suggests that the authoritarian regimes that have ruled much of the region for decades were bound to come under threat, and that some territories were likely to fall into chaos.  We surely, however, accelerated that process, and now it is under control.  The Germans might well have felt the same way about the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which they made possible by defeating the Russian Army so thoroughly during the First World War.  Not until Hitler, however, did they make an all-out effort to undo that result, and the consequences turned out to be disastrous for Germany.  Having helped set the disintegration of the Middle East in motion, we cannot arrest, much less reverse it.  It will play itself out by its own rules." DK

Parenthetically, one could speculate on what might have been:
"We will never know how politics would have been different in the Middle East if the Bush Administration had not invaded Iraq." DK.   Let's grant the likelihood of his suggestion. 

While I would admit that the tendency in American politics to blame one party is strong, I believe that some might want to take a closer look at the history of either party here, and how each of them has blundered, both militarily and ideologically, most everywhere force has been used in American history, by either party in the lead.

Vietnam was tagged with the moniker a Democrats' war.

The reasoning, late entry, and ideological approach, to WWI, under Hoover, then Wilson; the reasoning, flawed ideology, and military denouement, of WWII under Roosevelt, and after his death when political decision making essentially stopped apparently, Eisenhower's military role; the whole Korean War, are, to me, classic examples.

' (Eisenhower:) "From a tactical point of view," he said, "it is highly inadvisable for the American Army to take Berlin and I hope political influence won't cause me to take the city. It has no tactical or strategic value and would place upon the American forces the burden of caring for thousands and thousands of Germans, displaced persons and Allied prisoners of war." Patton was dismayed. "Ike, I don't see how you figure that out," he said. "We had better take Berlin, and quick-- and on to the Oder!" '

'...(Patton) again urged Eisenhower to take Berlin. It could be done, argued Patton, in forty-eight hours. "Well, who would want it?" Eisenhower asked. Patton paused, then put both hands on Eisenhower's shoulders and said "I think history will answer that question for you." ' Toland, The Last 100 Days, p 371.

There will be people out there, who will say things like  'can't betray an ally, we needed the Soviets, they deserved Eastern Europe for their war effort, we couldn't do it, we needed them for Japan,' various other things.

They may not even be aware that the Soviets, by the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, 1941, actually made Pearl Harbor possible.

Of course, if your intent was, and had remained, as was Roosevelt's and Morgenthau's, (cf eg Beschloss, The Comquerors) to reduce Germany, more or less forever, to bare subsistence farming, then Eisenhower, their faithful agent in this regard, would have been right about Berlin.  See Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, "Russia and the West as Allies", especially the concept of unconditional surrender.

Of course, had Roosevelt's and Morgenthau's plan been completely carried out, one would very soon then have had Stalin's hot Orthodox Civilization breath, breathing down, not only on Eastern Europe, but  on the very heart of Western Europe as well, taking over without resistance this subsistence farm land from its German peasants, a civilizational coup greater even than that of the Ottoman Sultan, with the help of France up to 1748 (and facilitated before WWI, and by its approach to denouement in WWII, by the same disgruntled, rogue Western Power, France).

RE DK CURRENT POST

"...The Germans might well have felt the same way about the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, which they made possible by defeating the Russian Army so thoroughly during the First World War.  Not until Hitler, however, did they make an all-out effort to undo that result, and the consequences turned out to be disastrous for Germany....."

Having read Kennan's (onto whom you put me several years ago) two volume account of 19th century diplomacy tending toward WW I, I am less persuaded, that it was mainly, or even primarily, only a German responsibility matter, in either war, than appears above. 

The rivalry between the Austrians and the Russians, as well as the British, for example, over the receding Ottoman Balkan lands was very much in play, and taken into account in all powers' machinations. 

There was, of course, the so called Fateful Alliance itself, also, gradually developing, as the German and Russian empires, erstwhile allies,  gradually parted ways.

Great passage at the end:

"I would suggest that the time has come for the United States to look inward before we are too critical of the Iraqis.  Our own government is just as divided between Republicans and Democrats as theirs is between religious factions. Indeed, religion plays an important part in our divide, too.  We, like the Iraqis, cannot agree on solutions to some truly fundamental problems, such as the status of millions of non-citizens within our nation and the control of our borders.  I strongly suspect that if a Democrat wins in 2016 we may be threatened with the break-up of the nation.  The image of a diverse nation in which the inhabitants regard themselves as citizens first, allowing them to rise above religious, regional and other differences, remains in inspiring one.  It is no longer, sadly, the kind of nation in which we now live."

AS MY FATHER IN LAW ONCE PUT IT

Domestically, we are rather like Germany before Bismarck.

Jonathan Steinberg had an entertaining lecture, partly on German fragmentation in the 17 and 18 th Centuries, as part of one of his Teaching Company Famous Lives Lectures. 

Re German political drift (analogous to Nevins' account of the run up here to the Civil War, but applicable to any period in our political history), he quoted a wag who put it something like: "nothing ever happens".

The truth of course was, and is, that things of the greatest importance are happening incessantly.

THIS WAS PERHAPS THE BEST EXTENDED TREATMENT DREW PEARSON FALLACY LORCH MEDIA

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2010/08/re-mr-paterson-editorial-same-old-media.html

Terms search: Lorch

RE WHAT I HAVE CALLED WW IV NOW WELL UNDER WAY

No great powers have declared war, but they have conducted various acts of war, what else would you call them, against other powers and each other, for several years now, cyber attacks, etc., on each other's home territory IT installations.

No one acknowledges this, but that is war. The fact that someone fails to declare war in advance is nothing new.  The attack on Pearl Harbor was covert to the extent possible, back then. That did not make it less an act of war for not having been announced in advance. 

When you have great powers attacking and infiltrating each others' security apparata themselves, that is war.

There are military conflicts now everywhere among various combatants within and across civilizations. 

That is a globalizing state of war. That is why I call it WW IV.

Also, I consider the first true world war to have been The Seven Years War. It was largely a civil war of the West, but global in scope, thus world war 1.

THIS WAS PRETTY FUNNY INCLUDING THE INSERTED POST

http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2013/06/re-drew-pearson-fallacy_30.html

RE THE MAVERICK EXECUTIVE

People like this topic.

I should point out, in passing that McMurry was one of my uncle's friends, apparently, not just a management guru he knew.

Don't buy the book. Check it out at a library.