Major economic powers hoarding oil? Sounds like war to me. Repeating myself I am but I keep remembering how a couple of years ago being ridiculed was the norm anytime I argued that the logic of the dynamics told me it was more likely than not that there'd be a military confrontation over Iran's nuke program - I still don't understand what it was made so many supposedly smart people resistant to a reasonable and objective appreciation of things. I've said it before and maybe it's true: I think liberals actually believed Obama - it's so idiotically absurd it's hard to imagine ostensibly bright people being this stupid - but I think they actually believed Obama's ascension to the throne signalled the ushering in of a new world order and they weren't about to let Iran spoil the prettiness of it all - these people sincerely thought it seems that war was a crudity that could only happen to unenlightened bumpkins like Bush. This almost willful embrace of naivety truly does confound me, I can't empathize with it at all - it's an outlook more in keeping with the delusional fantasies of love - and I suppose that's it because, really, what better explains the sad folly of these people than the besotted dementia of a romantic fixation?

Article in NY Times about Obama trying to hew an 'everyman' image of himself in opposition I guess to the elitism of Romney - an of the people graft as it were - an 'he plays baskeball, he's one of us' type of idiocy - and that's it, no where in the article does it suggest that this isn't idiotic or that having an everyman image matters in the least little bit as it relates to doing a good job as an executive. I'm not naive, I understand a 'president' is in many ways just another product that needs to be sold to a gullible public looking to buy something - but of course it's also much more than that - and yet the NY Times, the putative citadel of liberal intellectualism, regularly runs these de facto 'pro-ignorance' articles which pretend to some keen insight but amount to nothing more than tawdry advocacy that makes clear what really matters to them is a liberal agenda regardless of whether or not there's any intellectual merit to it.

I'm really sick of this puerile nonsense - from Santorum and his 'etch a sketch' inanity to supposed left wing intellectuals acting as if of course superficial imaging is a presidential attribute to be admired. Politics in its current incarnation looks increasingly ridiculous, a process not worthy of the history that made it. Don't know why this is since politics has always been plagued by the farcical [Aristophanes was treating it as farce 2000 years ago] - the system could undoubtedly use some tweaking - but I tend to feel the nature of modern media drives partisanship and partisanship, as with any absolutist urge, is by its very nature stupid. In other words, politics probably cannot be divorced from the simple mindedness of partisan appeals - but the scope and superficiality of modern media is possibly feeding the dependency in a very unhealthy way.

Interesting - the actions by SWIFT to shut down Iranian banks abilities to make international transactions [which, again, amounts to a virtual blockade and therefore is tantamount to an act of war] is front page news in Israel, but I don't see it on the front pages of any major American news source. Maybe it's not an indication of a native idiocy and they're just a little slow getting to it. Let's take a quick look at some European papers... no, nothing there either. Hmmn. Sure sounds to me like it should be big news. Guess I don't know what I'm talking about.

Now, it's not like I think Iran is actually gonna treat this as an act of war - still, something significant has to happen in response, no? Some other piece of this puzzle has to fall - my guess is it comes from China or Russia. I just don't see Iran capitulating - a fake capitulation, that's another thing.

Ah - I see Iran is shipping military supplies to Syria through Iraq - Iraq, namely Shiite president Malaki, is refusing to stop this activity, but is managing to push down sharply on Iraqi Sunni attempts to send similar aid to their afflicted brethren. And yet American commentators still rally for a US involvement in Syria - not once have I heard one of these idiots address the fact that if we start a full blown civil war in Syria it could easily spill across the borders into Iraq and Lebanon and then germinate into something quite dangerous - not once have I heard any of them address fact that maybe Iran would love for us to wade into a Syrian quagmire - would certainly both give the Mullahs a very efficient way to divert the peoples attention away from the hardships the sanctions are supposedly causing while proffering up a perfect rationalization for why Iran needs the bomb - these fools do admit, reluctantly it seems, to reality of how utterly disorganized the Syrian 'opposition' is but then fail to mention how rife with radicalism it is as well, both of which conditions suggest that if we stoke to full boil this simmering civil war it could turn very ugly very quickly and end up empowering some strikingly unpleasant devotees of the prophet.

Still find myself shocked at how many American pundits and so called experts embrace involvement in this fucked up little corner of the world as if Iraq and Afghanistan never happened. Not that I'm suggesting that America divest itself of interests in the region - but is it too much to ask of people getting paid to comment on tactics and strategy related to foreign policy to show some respect for a careful meditation on evidence and the cautionary deliberations of experience?

Apparently North Korea is planning to launch a satellite soon and thereby test long range ballistic missile technology [so much for the reset implied by recent signed agreement that was remarkable only for the fact of how many people actually thought it a milestone of some sort]. Now, it was during Bush's last term [or possibly we were already in Obama world] that similarly troubling missile technology was test fired - and there was much debate about whether the US should shoot the missile down. Without benefit of hindsight there's no correct answer in this kind of debate since there's much potential downside no matter which way you go - but I supported shooting it down for these reasons: the only way to perfect this technology is by trying it out - you shoot it down, they can't perfect it; if we don't call their bluff on these things the dynamics suggest the provocation will just worsen - them launching a satellite is a perfect example of this; we have anti-missile technology - there may be an upside to getting to test it in a real world situation - and then ask yourself if there's a nice deterrence payoff from an interdiction of this sort - would it help re Iran? - of course, if we try and then fail to knock the thing down, that's not good.

So here we go again with N Korea testing missile technology that we definitely don't want them perfecting and then exporting - what to do? I say shoot the thing down. At some point there has to be a line you cannot allow countries like this to cross - otherwise you're opening the door to devils unknown.

Viz my prior post on China vs India, from Globe and Mail article:

UNICEF says that 640 million Indians are still “open defecators” – people who relieve themselves in fields or next to railway tracks – a figure that remains high despite hikes in government spending on sanitation projects. Local governments have tangled those projects in corruption and bureaucracy, and even in places where toilet blocks are built, people have been slow to adopt use of the new facilities.

Wow. And I complain about having to navigate my way around dog crap that yuppies refuse to pick up in my pleasant little neighbourhood. This info just floors me. Put India down as one of those countries I will never, ever visit.

Would my opinion of Obama change if he were to attack Iran? Two stories came out today that seem to suggest either Obama or Israel or both are indeed very serious about not letting Iran nuke up - apparently Obama sent a message that sounds like an ultimatum through Russian diplomatic channels to Iranian brass telling them they have till April to respond positively on demands to step down their program - and then very much under the radar a Navy officer in a senate committee meeting let slip that the US now has four minesweepers in or on their way to the Persian Gulf, which according to some Navy analysts I read suggests the US is definitely preparing for something bad. This is either a very hard edged bluff or Obama actually really means it when he says he has Israel's back - even if only a bluff, the severity of it suggests the Obama administration believes Israel has already decided to do this thing if something doesn't happen soon to convince them otherwise.

I'm so used to seeing Obama as a person whose every act is motivated solely by political calculation [whether to promote a leftwing agenda or promote himself through a leftwing agenda, I dunno] that even though I know it's absurd [right?] to read a political component into something so dramatic as this, should he actually do it, I still can't give the man the benefit of the doubt. Regardless, if he goes there, I will have to reevaluate him.

That being said, I don't think he does it - I think this is probably all about putting as much pressure on Iran as possible and knowing full well that's likely to fail, and then being prepared for the shit storm that will follow. I think this means that Obama has finally figured out that for Israel it's a perfectly logical thing to view an attack on Iran as yes dangerous, full of peril, unpredictably bad in all sorts of ways, and yet still necessary.

[the report of the ultimatum passed through Russian channels is being denied - the deployment of significant naval assets though is quite real. Also pay attention to recent act by SWIFT, a huge financial institutions communications supplier based I think in Brussels - it has shut down, by EU decree, services for Iranian banks etc - which from what I read means Iran cannot do international banking anymore, which means I guess they can't engage in normal trade practices etc etc. Seems this would significantly ramp up pressure on the Mullahs, to what end who knows. Also I would guess ramps up pressure on Russia and China to help Iran circumvent this virtual blockade or publicly disavow support for them - cause a blockade which this is essentially amounts to an act of war by the EU on Iran. If we get to the end of April and Iran still hasn't caved gotta believe tensions will be dramatically spiking. Should we expect Iranian backed terroist attacks against Brussels, the EU homebase? I dunno - don't know what to expect at this point, other than it's likely to be bad whatever it is]

What would happen if in some magical world you could put Paul Ryan and Obama together in a room and have them debate for three hours healthcare and entitlements and budget deficits and tax reform and then force every voting age person in America to watch it? What percentage of the electorate would come away from that debate with a thorough enough understanding of the details, not vitiated by bias, to form an enlightened judgement on who won, who was more in the right? One percent? Two? Possibly at the most five percent? And yet somehow we're convincing ourselves that the election in November is going to set us on a path to fix our problems? How exactly? Pure luck? A deus ex machina? At what point does democracy devolve into an exercise in willful ignorance generated out of fear or laziness or the decay of incoherence?

Santorum's bible belt wins last night [although he rakes in only 3 more delegates than Romney did, who won Hawaii, at the end of the day][actually turns out Romney finished 6 delegates ahead of Santorum overall] reminds me of this Politco essay from yesterday - essentially an article about how stupid voters are - I like the quote from a guy who runs a polling company on how he has to explain to his clients over and over again, because they get so frustrated from the incoherent results, of how they gotta keep in mind that, ya know, voters are stupid.

Now, none of this is new - I of course like to joke that the problem with democracy is that people get to vote - and I've said all along that the reason this GOP primary has been so disturbing is because of the way it has thrown into sharp relief the fact of how ignorant or misinformed or delusional or enthralled to simplistic instincts the average voter is - and that's because all along it's been very clear there has only ever been one credible candidate, and yet the likes of Herman Cain - Herman Cain people! - have at times been enthusiastically embraced by the electorate. I mean, think about it, in yesterday's southern primaries over two thirds of votes cast were for candidates that are deeply flawed [and in Gingrich's case mentally unstable as far as I'm concerned] and so ideologically extreme or otherwise compromised as to be virtually unelectable in a campaign versus Obama [and in Paul's case absolutely unelectable]. Even in Hawaii, which Romney won handily, still over half the votes cast were for guys who are either farcically unfit to be president or have no chance of beating Obama or both. How can a reasonable person not be troubled by something like this?

Democracy, in its modern incarnation, has in general seemed to survive this vulnerability of ignorance, possibly because the dynamic of change and individual empowerment implicit in the idea of democracy adds such vigor and value to a society that it easily out weighs the downside of electoral mistakes. My question is are we reaching a point where this balancing of good and bad, which by and large has tilted in our favor, starts tilting the other way? I'm thinking specifically of a few factors which seem to be working against us here - increased competition from the wider, often non-democratic world; mass media that seems to feed partisanship which in turn feeds gridlock which in turn feeds an impulse towards the ignorance of populism - and also how this saturation of mass media may rob elites [or the elites that really matter] of a power they have always had to control events [to that point a story I read recently fascinates because of how it reveals polls in the 60s showed most Americans opposed the space program - which means the program went ahead because elites understood how important it was]; and finally how the complexity to the problems we now face makes the knowledge gap in the electorate seem like a much more disturbing vulnerability than it did before - well, not just seem, the knowledge shortfall is now undeniably I think, when measured against the complexity of the issues facing us, a very real concern.

[of course the problems the EU is going through right now would strongly suggest that 'elites', especially of the bureaucratic kind, are no better at distinguishing up from down, good from bad, wise from ill advised, than the putatively 'ignorant' chattel of the state]

[and then even if one is willing to concede that Western democracies have become in a sense too democratic and therefore we must migrate towards some kind of oligarchic hybrid, you still have the problem of insuperable ideological divides - possibly the answer is getting rid of political parties, or just making the executive branch a truly independent body that is not beholden to a specific ideological agenda]

[I'm seen picking on republicans here but the fact is it was Obama's election that got me thinking in these terms - the utterly irrational way not just the average person, but also elites justified their enthusiasm for the man was quite disturbing - to me it's obvious that Obama is president because the country was swept up in a wave of mass delusion fed by abject ignorance and naivety. The real scary part is that all the alternatives to him were equally problematic - Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency? Jesus. Hillary probably would have been a better CEO than Obama but I have not been impressed at all by her performance as secretary of state - but at least her nomination would have made some rational sense. Historians may very well look back on the election of 2008 and say that was the point democracy took a blind turn down a very ugly road]

What's the right word... stunned? Dumbfounded? Dumb definitely fits - so dumbfounded then that so many republicans are still trying to, if not actually defend Limbaugh, then striving desperately to rationalize or deflect criticism of him. Now it's big Obama boy uber liberal Bill Maher's use of 'misogynistic' language towards women that they're peddling to show that it ain't just conservatives who have a problem with the ladies - ah, listen guys, comparing Limbaugh to Maher is moronic, no one's gonna buy that, and anyway it quite misses the point - the real problem with Limbaugh was not the objectionable language per se - hell, I can walk by the catholic girls school down the street from me at lunch hour and hear language that would make an epithet like 'slut' seem positively timid - so it's not the abusive language per se - it's the confirming of the impression to moderate, independent women that conservatives see females as a problem that can easily be solved by turning back the clock fifty years. Most women I know were just as outraged by the fact Rush didn't seem to know how birth control pills work than they were by the imputation that anyone who uses them must be doing so because they're intent on destroying America through very unladylike wantonness.

It's stunning how many conservatives just don't seem to get this - and worse, don't seem to get how very bad it is that one of their presidential candidates has openly expressed opinons that suggest that for him there's nothing wrong with the country that can't be fixed by taking away from women the right to judge for themselves how, where, when, with whom and how often they are having sex. After all, who can quibble with the fact that the only thing standing between a righteous man and God's salvation is a sexed up woman? This is obvious.