House of Eratosthenes

The post title is a rip-off of a line spoken in the first Die Hard movie, toward the end, when the rooftop blows up along with the helicopter: “Looks like we’ll need some more FBI guys.”

Agents Johnson and Johnson, you’ll remember, were about as useful as tits on fish, and the same goes for the apology.

The Pentagon said Monday that it will not change its “fundamental strategy” in Afghanistan despite a week of crises that have worsened the strained partnership between the Afghan government and U.S. and NATO forces.

U.S. officials acknowledged that tensions remain high in Kabul and that distrust has not dissipated since last weekend’s killing of two U.S. military officers inside the Afghan Interior Ministry, apparently by a rogue Afghan security officer.

The killings, which prompted Marine Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. and NATO commander, to pull service members from the ministries, have forced NATO advisers in Kabul to limit communication with Afghan government ministries to telephone and e-mail. U.S. officials said Monday that, although the measure is temporary, no date has been set for the advisers to return to work.

Hat tip to blogger friend Terri.

You know, it’s a funny thing about chestless policy decisions: It seems everyone forgets when they’re tried and they fail. I guess the expectation isn’t there. King Kong vs. Godzilla, you have to watch and see what happens, but Bambi vs. Godzilla follows a plot trajectory of “expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.” At any rate, it is clear our leaders have gotten the message: Always do the tepid thing and you’ll have a long political life…just be a bureaucrat looking forward to the big fat pension, in charge of thousands of other bureaucrats looking forward to their big fat pensions, you’ll never be criticized. Not with any force or meaning anyway, and hey, that’s what it’s all about.

Blogger friend Rick brings us a clip of a certain presidential candidate who used to be the Speaker of the House…one who suffers, along with others among us, myself included, from the slings and arrows that are hurled in one’s direction when one dares to notice patterns of things.

It’s a bad pattern to be noticing, but it would be much worse to not notice it and allow it to continue.

Seems to me the United States is getting more enemies lately, and fewer friends, while it becomes more and more costly for other countries to be our friend, and less and less expensive for them to pick fights with us.

Therein lies the focus of where our foreign policy needs to go; it is the very idea that, all by itself, separates the policies of strong nations from the policies of weaker ones. President Freeberg would (before being run out of DC, probably tarred & feathered) make it a one-sentence pre-amble, on page one of said policy, all printed out in Microsoft Word & everything: The objective of this foreign policy, second to none other, is to increase the dividend, or at least diminish the cost, to other nations engaged with us in an amicable relationship, and impose a terrible cost upon those who choose to become our enemy.

Although I’m natural-born and over thirty-five, realistically, that probably isn’t going to happen. So as we hope for the next-best possibility, a mystery confronts us: What is up with all these Let Greedo Shoot First bureaucrats getting sworn in to the highest office in the land. Now that we know for a fact — we need not argue about it, it is a matter of historical record — that mediocrity and tepid responses from our leaders do nothing to diminish violence and bloodshed…and there’s such a craving for the opposite, long-lived as well as intense…why is it that the geldings win, seemingly, most of the time?

We do have an energized and passionate anti-war effort, it is true. And some of their intentions are admirable. What does it matter, though, if when they are privileged to choose our leaders for us, over the protests of the rest of us, the end result is indistinguishable from what would take place if they had no voice at all?

It seems a working functional long-term memory is a human ability monopolized by the hawkish, denied to the dovish. It seems, also, that perhaps that is what makes hawks hawks. Peaceniks cannot recognize patterns of things. History always began this morning in their world.

Thing I Know #52. Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met.

why is it that the geldings win, seemingly, most of the time?

Partly, at least, because they are the best at wielding the seductive power of abstraction.

To put it another way: Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met, because their demands were almost entirely abstract to begin with.

Consider that even the hippy-dippiest flower-power hooray-Che moonbat is intensely conservative in her personal life. She loved living in a “gentrifying” neighborhood when she was young and single, but the minute her life-partner passed the pregnancy test, they celebrated diversity by calling the realtor (progressive enclaves are notoriously monochrome). And should the otherwise all-knowing government ever decree that little Moon Unit’s exclusive preschool must serve non-vegan snacks once a week, that week’s Code Pink meeting would sound like the Ayn Rand Fan Club. Needless to say she doesn’t pay a dime more than necessary in income tax, using every trick of “the 1%” her accountant can find. &c.

But the minute it switches from “me personally” or “that kid right there, whom I know and care about personally,” folks’ eyes start to glaze over. The liberal version of this is more fun to mock (everyone gripes about his doc-in-the-box HMO, but somehow a national doc-in-the-box HMO…), but conservatives fall victim to it, too — “the underclass just needs to get a job,” they say, though they never do get around to telling us just what kind of a job ghetto-dwellers and backwoods crackers, with third-grade educations and probable fetal alcohol syndrome, could possibly get.

It seems to follow logically, then — insofar as these things can be said to obey logic — that questions of international relations suffer the worst eye-glazing. If I know next to nothing about “the underclass” or “liberals” — and I’m completely baffled by both, even though I’ve been surrounded by the latter my entire adult life and have more than a passing acquaintance with the former– then how much could I possibly know about “Afghanistan” or “the Middle East,” where they don’t even have the common courtesy to speak English and watch Dancing with the Stars like normal people?

The well-nigh only predictor of future behavior is past behavior. But just as we all tend to forget that we believe in evolution when it comes to the education of our little darlings (“everyone’s equally awesome at everything!”), so too do we fall victim to some windbag who claims to know how to sort out “China” or handle “the Israeli-Palestinian problem”… especially when the only two “solutions” on offer seem to be huge abstractions like “war” and “negotiation.” Any real plan to settle, say, Iran to America’s benefit would start out with specifics like “targeted strikes on command-and-control” and “dusting off those old ‘mutually-assured destruction’ plans from the 1950s”…. while the whole time, the other guy is airing nice fluffy abstractions like “compromise” and “sanctions.”

I guess this is all my long-winded way of pointing out the uncontroversial, indeed cliche, idea that liberalism absolutely evaporates when asked for specifics (“what does ‘social justice’ look like?”). But details don’t put butts in voting booths — I can confidently say we’ll never be swearing in President Paul Ryan (even though the very thought of that makes my pants fit funny). Politics these days is thus a question of making my gassy, abstract nonsense sound better than your gassy, abstract nonsense….
- Severian | 02/28/2012 @ 10:30

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Looks Like We’ll Need Another ApologyTuesday, February 28th, 2012

Looks Like We’ll Need Another Apology
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012