What up?
Suppose you are driving along in your late-model US-brand automobile and it suddenly goes quiet and rolls to a stop, the engine dead. The car won't start. You have it towed to a mechanic who looks at the brand and then tells you there is nothing wrong with the car. You say to him, If the car is okay, then start it up. No, he says, I have a car, and points to his Toyota. I don't need to drive your car. But, he continues, there can be nothing wrong with your car because it is an American car and they cannot fail.
As you consider your options, the mechanic having returned to his office, a disheveled man sidles up to you, looks around furtively, and says, It's the electronic ignition. Can you fix it? you ask. If you can get the part, he says. They don't make replacements because they can't fail.
Such an absurdist scenario might be taken from Ionesco or early Albee, but it is typical of the situation within the US right now.
George Bush the Younger has said that he was mistaken to provide the fiscal stimulus to the US financial system as it ground to a halt, an act that was probably the only rational decision made by his administration. The financial system itself would fit directly into Ionesco or Becket, and that is where much of the fear comes from, particularly for the clowns who call themselves conservatives. They sense a problem with the rickety structure, but they don't understand it except in partisan visions. They like to think they believe the libertarian dream of Ron Paul which comes out of classical economics and does not fit with the corporation-dominated feudal system held together by individual debt, endlessly printed money and unproductive make-work in a "service" economy that provides few services not forced on citizens. But it is arguable that the classical "economy" would not support the materialism of US society that has become synonymous with freedom.
Conservative reality-denying commentators insist that the US health care system, with one of the highest mortality rates in the world directly attributable to medical fuck-ups, hence simultaneously the most expensive and most dangerous health care system in the world, is in great shape. Is the best in the world except perhaps for some inefficiencies (read, for example, Charles Krauthammer, a commentator with an exceptionally high ceremonially-certified-education-to-sense-ratio, reminiscent of Rachel Maddow on the opposite political side: Krauthammer seems to believe that actuarial skills are objective, as complete a misunderstanding of reality as Maddow's belief that NASA guides satellites). Even as the cost of US healthcare outstrips inflation and the competence of the institutions worsens, the "conservatives" tell the citizenry that it is the best in the world. And to disagree with the claim is to be unpatriotic.
This is to be expected in a nation that ranks among the lowest in reading and problem-solving ability of any but the most third world of nations. That is one reason the US needs to import knowledge workers, particularly in science and engineering and mathematics. Tom Bradley, watching from Japan, believes he sees physical evidence of microcephaly in the US. Being immersed in the conservative heart of one of the least productive areas of the US, I don't see the physical evidence so sharply as I sense it in the discourse which includes television advertising and "news." Bradley's judgment seems extreme until one examines a photo of the likes of Glenn Beck or Charlie Gasparino. It would certainly make sense of their incoherence.
One wonders how often the ding-a-ling Rush Limbaugh accused physicians of practicing junk science while shopping for drug suppliers. The idea that people with no grasp of any scientific theory whatsoever would call a theory junk amazes me. My neighbor told me that climate change was junk science. I certainly am not qualified to judge the complex chemistry and physics involved, though the statistical evidence for the increase of carbon dioxide with the industrial revolution seems incontrovertible (and reasonable, while admitting there are questions regarding the capacity of the planet to absorb carbon dioxide that are beyond my understanding). But I do have the ability to learn the basics of the problem and investigate the arguments from a technical perspective even as I lack the interest to do so. This keeps me from making claims one way or the other. But I asked my neighbor (an MBA, perhaps one of the most vapid of all studies, albeit with high ceremonial and pecuniary value and prized in this economy of workless work) if he had read any of the papers deriving the physical models. He became incensed. Why can't they write that stuff so we laymen can read it? he asked. I didn't ask him to explain in detail how his electronic ignition works, or his GPS receiver, or his cell phone. Or his radio. Or even the banking system or Treasury auctions or Federal Reserve open market actions. But even among some of those who were trained technically it is a sad situation (witness the list of PhDs who sign their names to a statement that global warming is not valid, some of whom I know personally, and know that they have no expertise regarding the technical soundness of the arguments one way or the other). As when an actuary who I assumed understood statistics said climate experts had to explain the unusual cool conditions this summer in certain locales. I didn't bother to ask what he knew about outliers and excursions in the face of averages, but his statement was as idiotic as that of the idiotic global warming naysayer who asked how can theorists predict long term stochastic events when they can't "even" get the short term predictions right? Anyone who understands stochastic processes understands how stupid a question that is; it is why there exists the Allan variance for atomic clocks, for example, with which long term predictions are highly accurate while short term predictions are almost impossible. The predictability of long term averages and unpredictability of short term averages is typical of most random processes. As is the fluctuation about the trend in stochastic dynamical systems. Perhaps a course in the relationship between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics would place this in some perspective, though given the educational system's necessity to replace substance with buzz words in order to "teach" the masses, it probably would be impossible to find such a class outside a graduate program in mathematical physics. I suggest instead reading chapter III of Mark Kac's Probability and Related Topics in Physical Sciences or at least chapter one of Colin J. Thompson's Mathematical Statistical Mechanics, with particular attention to sections 1-8 and 1-9. Since these are easy as it gets regarding the statistics of physical systems, if you find you can't understand the material then you ought to stop yapping about global warming and statistics, regardless of your uninformed opinion.
I personally take no side in the debate regarding global warming. The current theories of earth's climate seems to me as primitive as the Ptolemaic theory of the solar system. But I recognize that clowns like Pat Buchanan are talking out their asses, as are those like Al Gore on the other side. However, the argument over global warming is itself insignificant. More dangerous are the pinheads like Senator James Inhofe who base their decisions on superstitions regarding something they call God. Granted that most elected officials don't know shit from Shinola, the superstitious are in a class all their own. It is the propensity of US citizens to elect such superstitious ignoramuses that drives the future of the US. They would do better to elect people who admit what they don't know, but to admit not knowing something in politics is a fast form of political suicide. (I would hazard to guess that a significant factor in the death-box called the US healthcare system is physicians who cannot admit what they don't know.)
People ask how Germany could have fallen into the hands of the Nazis. They've been trained to assume Hitler was so apparently evil in his goal of taking over the nation that it was obvious. Yet Karl Rove expressed just such a goal in his desire to have the US become a one-party system with a Republican takeover. Does that make Rove evil? I don't think so (though the word evil has no objective significance in any case). I think he probably believes, as I am sure Hitler believed, it would be good for the country. And like Hitler, I am sure Rove (and Cheney and Palin and Beck) believe that it would be good for the world if the US took it over. That is the neocon wet dream, forcing what they consider "Democracy" down the throats of everyone.
Consider in this context of forcible Democratization of the world at gunpoint the words of Norman Davies in his monumental and informative Europe: A History. "Democracy has few values of its own: it is as good, or as bad, as the principles of the people who operate it. In the hands of liberal and tolerant people, it will produce a liberal and tolerant government; in the hands of cannibals, a government of cannibals."
The operative word is cannibal. The question is, what are cannibals? Citizens of the US would not consider themselves cannibals; does anyone believe that the residents of Hitler's Germany considered themselves cannibals? Yet it is the very act of voting for superstitious know-nothing pols like Inhofe that brings the cannibals to power.
Clearly Cheney must believe his militarism is good for the US. Palin also espouses militarist goals, though it is not clear that Palin has much idea of what she is talking about given the absurd gaffes she makes when she tries to say something of significance. Anyone who doesn't see this about Palin is either blind or stupid or both. It is the reason so many conservative "wonks" are trying to educate the bimbo. Is she smart? I don't know. I can't tell. But I do sense from the utterances that exit her mouth that she is completely uneducated in the workings of the US government, in the US Constitution, in comparative government, in classical economics, in history, and I would guess she is probably functionally illiterate to boot. There is little doubt to me that most of her conservative mentors are functionally illiterate; the ability to read words does not imply an ability to grasp the significance of strings of words, or more importantly, to perceive when such strings lack objectively verifiable signification. A perfect example is the huge population of morons who use the term "free market" without any idea of what the concatenation of those ten symbols (including the space) signifies. In fact, they signify nothing objective. Free market, like evil, is an emotive expression. There is no operational definition of free market, hence it has no objective significance. For many, it is a variant of the meaningless word God.
But I diverge from the track — which is to arrive at a forecast of the US political future which in part hinges on the difference between conservatives and the liberals they define and demonize: liberals do not seem to believe they need to be the only people in control. Such a belief is a significant part of why it is not the liberals who constitute a danger to the Republic — it's the conservatives. Conservatives believe that they need to gain complete control of the US or it will somehow dissolve into tyranny. Worse, they are too dull-witted to see the irony of such a conviction.
