Bravo!

The Buddhist monks of Rangoon, Burma are displaying an almost superhuman amount of bravery at this very moment. Burma is a place of slave labor, torture, and the use of rape as a government-sanctioned method of repression. These monks are showing a million times more love of freedom and liberty than all the armies of the US, UK, and Australia combined.

Prelude to an escalation

It looks as if the Iranian President has now been shown to sprout horns and a tail. I suppose that is intended to make it easier to sell the notion that this country can afford another war even bigger than the one that has been lost in Iraq.

More misdirected piety and counterproductive surliness from our side

The City of New York has officially refused the request of Iranian President Ahmadinejad to lay a wreath at the site of the World Trade Center. Guess who benefits the most in a political sense from that decision? Now guess who benefits the least?

The bottom line is that denying Ahmadinejad permission to lay his wreath in New York benefits him and his regime and no one else. He will be able to say, "Look, they wouldn't allow me to do the right thing, what am I supposed to do with people like these?" And his country will buy that, so will a whole lot of Iraqi Shi'ites. Ahmadinejad probably knew that he would be refused and knew that it would benefit him.

Paul Kennedy was right

Back in 1988, when I was reading Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers", a university professor came up to me and said, "You'd better read that quickly because it's all about to become irrelevant." What he meant was that the Eastern Block was about to free itself (hence a re-united Germany), the Soviet Union was about to fall apart, South Africa was about to be taken over by the ANC, and the world was supposedly shaking off a thousand years of traditional power politics in favor of something else. I remember looking at him and thinking, "I'm still going to keep the message of Paul Kennedy in mind," i.e. that big powers tend to grow until they have overstretched themselves due to ever-growing costly security responsibilities that accompany the creation and maintenance of economic power and control of trade beyond one's borders.

I think that Kennedy is about to become hugely relevant again with one caveat and that is that in his system there is usually another power (or several powers) ready to step in and take over the mantle of "great" power (such as the US did after the fall of the British Empire). The difference now is that there is no heir apparent to US power. As the US overstretches itself with attempting to control the seas, the air, the trade rules, and the energy sources of most of the world....there is no one to fill the vacuum of the inevitable ensuing decline in power and influence.

And please don't say it's China. They can't even send their warships and fighter planes outside their territory because they're too afraid that everyone aboard will defect. They have 800 million seriously impoverished people hanging around their neck like a millstone. Their entire economic boom is dependent on US over-consumption (a thing that is about to take a huge dip btw).

Russia? Their decline in population combined with huge land area spells weakness.

The EU? The EU is effectively a consensually occupied territory with not even the desire to be self-sufficient in a security sense much less be in a position to project power (even though its member countries basically invented world domination as a concept and a practice)...so where to?

That's it then, for the first time since the Philippines....

Iraq is now a colony of the U.S. It used to be said that the only colony America had ever had was the Philippines in the years following the Spanish-American War. But here America is going back into the realm of the white man's burden (like a virgin into a volcano).....or perhaps rather than white man's burden, we should now call it the culturally Christian (but occasionally also Jewish, Shinto-ist, Confucian, or Hindu), G-8, corporatist man's (and woman's, i.e. Rice, Townsend, and, forgive me, Hillary) burden.

There's an old saying among American shop-owners (especially antique shop owners) that goes like this, "You break it, you own it." Well America has broken Iraq, and now America owns Iraq.

The Neglected Fifth Column Against Terror

As I read the German newspapers about three guys being arrested with 1,500 pounds of explosive material that they had allegedly planned to make bombs out of along with the news that they are allegedly Muslim militants hellbent on terror, I couldn't help but remind myself of a certain important tool against terror that has been completely underused....and that is ridicule. If everyone from the blind cleric on to Osama Bin Laden and Al-Zarqawi had been roundly and successfully mocked and laughed at for their idiocy, then they would have had almost no following by now. Instead they were made into the outlaws, the out-of-control desperados, the master criminals, the crazed zealots. All of those are things that our society has romanticized over time. Think of Jesse James, Captain Morgan, and even Al Capone. Brutal men committing brutal acts against innocent people have been an inspiration to down-and-out losers all over the world for centuries. So now we are at the point that wayward young western men are being caught playing the jihadi game, and I would bet my bottom dollar that the reason for it is the huge notoriety of the more famous terrorists.

The answer? Ridicule. We need to start making fun of these guys and need to do it fast! Otherwise, just like Manson found the unlikeliest of converts (i.e. upper-middle class white Anglo-Americans), so will Bin Laden. Believe me it's coming....unless we open a can of ruthless mockery on the asses of those who harm us.