Odds and Ends 4-10-2012

Since I have not done this in awhile, I will throw some links up to what has caught my attention lately.

Locally, the apple orchards that are such a part of the region are under threat thanks to the cold snap this week. The combination of unusually warm temperatures followed by unusually cold ones is lethal to apple buds. Not much can be done but hope there will be Honeycrisp’s this year.

Ah, those wacky Japanese using high tech to better humanity. Oh wait…

At least they are diverting resources from making robot women. Don’t get me started there.

Having watched the dot com bubble of the late nineties, I have been getting the feeling of déjà vu again. It turns out I am not alone in worrying over how the latest Internet startups are over priced. I suspect we are headed for a dot com bubble 2.0.

The media in all its forms is increasingly dishonest as things crank up for the elections this year. Race baiting is one of the more evil ways to stir things up and it is being employed fully as a rallying tactic for the left. Outright fabrications are being spread around to inflame tensions. The ends justifying the means rarely leads to anything good, but people never seem to learn that.

The mainstream media cannot be trusted to be guardians of the truth or public good and I wonder if they ever were worthy of it. Given how partisan they have become, they resemble the state controlled media of totalitarian states more and more. Maybe the idea that yellow journalism died out was an illusion in the first place.

One thing that has bothered me for a very long time is how humanity lost its willingness to take risks by the end of the 20th Century. We need to go to space, take chances, colonize, and build. Yes, people will die in the endeavor, but there are far worse things than death. One of them is stagnation. So it is sad to see plans from the 1950s aimed at going to Mars and realizing there is little chance that will happen this century.

I am probably not alone in that. An anime adaptation of Space Brothers has started airing in Japan and streaming worldwide at Crunchyroll. It is a rare thing these days to see an anime featuring characters that are all adults and dealing with adult problems. Set in the near future, it is about a pair of brothers hoping to make it to the Moon and beyond as astronauts. Warm and sentimental, it also catches some of the current cultural malaise in Japan. Man, it makes me wish we had real space programs and not the token jokes we have today.

The Long Arm of Uncle Sam

This article on Wired (via Instapundit) caught my attention today. It may surprise people to see just how absolute the Fed’s power over the Internet really is. So any website ending in com, org, or net is claimed to be under United States jurisdiction. What does that mean? It means they can legally shut down any website in the world that ends with those suffixes.

Meanwhile, Anonymous are in a tizzy after one of their own rolled over to the Feds. Language warning for the article, BTW. LulzSec is pretty much done, but there are still quite a few in Anonymous who are sweating bullets at this point.

I am afraid a lot of people assume they can do whatever they want and get away with it due to government incompetence. The thing to remember is that governments are slow and ponderous, but not oblivious. Eventually they will get around to pursuing cyber criminals if they draw enough attention to themselves. With Anonymous constantly making declarations, they might as well be wearing blinking neon signs. Their time is running out.

No deep thoughts on any of this today, because it is merely interesting data for the moment.

Regime Change Brings Nuclear Change to Korea?

Well, this is unexpected, but welcome news – IF North Korea holds up their end of the bargain. Color me skeptical, but this kind of announcement has happened time and time again, only for the dictatorship in Pyongyang to renege on their promises and through inspectors out.

At least we will find out if the new regime is any different than its predecessors.

A Good Metaphor for the Times

Watching this video of a Brazilian rescue helicopter shaking itself apart made me think of of how current political and economic events going on across the world are being handled. My second thought was that it did not look real and appeared to be a RC model. Amazing how the human eye and brain responds to something it has not seen before.

I hope and pray those injured will recover quickly.

War Drums

As the world economic situation deteriorates, another problem is rising and that is the steady beat of war drums across the globe. Political, rather than economic, interests are the prime motivators as old grudges flare in some places and civil unrest lures in outside forces in others. The latest hotspot is one I did not see coming and would be ridiculous to fight a war over if it were not for changing geopolitical conditions.

Argentina is ramping up the rhetoric against Great Britain over the Falklands and it is getting more serious than any dispute over an island filled with sheep should get. After having lost the Falklands War in the early 1980’s, it appeared to be a nonissue until recently when South American countries began expanding their military arsenals. A steadily declining U.K. military is now unlikely to be able to defend their citizens living in the Falklands, so an opportunity has arisen for Argentina. Claiming the Brits are sending nuclear missiles to the area is an extraordinary claim, the kind that is usually ginned up for a war.

Another thing to consider is that they now have the backing of Brazil, which has become an economic and military regional power looking to expand their influence. There is a desire to get rid of all European influence in the area and also American influence. Throw in a presidential re-election campaign for Cristina Kirchner and things start getting restive.

While that little drama unfolds, the Obama administration is quietly preparing for war with Iran and an armed intervention in Syria much like what was done in Libya. That means bypassing Congress again and should be of concern to more people than it is. If we hit Syria, Iran will fight us since they have sent forces in to back the dictator Assad in what really has become a civil war. No matter what happens, I expect Islamic extremists to end up in control of Syria, just like Libya and Egypt.

Israel will most likely be forced to hit Iranian nuclear weapons facilities this year. Survival is an important thing to the Israelis and they need to protect themselves from the increasingly irrational Iranians. Civil unrest remains a fear in Iran and they recently cut access to large parts of the Internet in hopes of preventing more.

Asia is not exempt from all the “fun.” Continued over flights of neighboring countries territory by China is still causing tension and an arms race in the area. Their ships have been equally aggressive and have challenged Philippino sovereignty. Japan also has the Russians sending bombers over their territory as Russia tries to reestablish their might around the Kurile Islands. Oddly enough, tensions with North Korea appear to be abating or are on hold while the new regime sorts itself out.

Will any of these hotspots break out into actual fighting? I think the Middle East is the closest thing to a sure bet thanks to Iran and Syria. In the long run, Asia is building towards war, but internal stresses in China may derail that.

So why do I feel like the atmosphere is like that of the years leading up to World War I?

Going Intellectually Bankrupt

One of the more interesting chapters in the Intellectual Property (IP) wars was the takedown attempt of the Pirate Bay website. While Sweden sent the creators of the site to prison, it did not really end the site. Conspiracy theories abounded about the Unites States government being involved and now it has proven to be true. It is interesting material for those fascinated by IP laws getting out of hand, but there was a talkback post by an anonymous person that lays out the real reason this is going on. Read the whole post, but this is the best paragraph:

The drive is to twist the world into accepting intellectual property as if it were something tangible. The US pushes this hard because it is the only thing they have left. The idea is not to own the methods of production, but to own the instructions for the methods of production, and make others pay for using the instructions.

In a nutshell, that is exactly the situation and why Hollywood has disproportionate say in Washington, D.C. When NAFTA was passed back in the 1990’s, it was the beginning of the end for American manufacturing and, in my opinion, nation security/stability. What we are seeing today is the final result of believing in getting money for nothing.

And that is not going to end well.

Panic Has Hit the File Sharing Services

So after going through my normal routine of to start the day, I decided to check on some of the tech sites to see what effect the Megaupload arrests were having on the online community. While Anonymous continues to make sporadic and ineffective attacks in retaliation, other file services are beginning to react. Filesonic has stopped allowing file sharing altogether, which means users can only upload and download their own files. Slightly less panicked, FileServe has reportedly ended their affiliate program where users were paid when they got others to join the service. As many have already commented, who needs SOPA or PIPA when the U.S. government can already reach out and have people in New Zealand arrested?

While I do not like the ease with which the international arrests were carried out at the behest of Hollywood, it was painfully obvious what these file services were created for. So I do not mourn their passing in the least. Yet I wonder what affect it will have on the legitimate file locker companies? While I am not terribly enthused about cloud based computing in general, I do use Amazon’s cloud service to back up my purchased iTunes and MP3 files. Oh and then there is Steam, which is a cloud like service that I am fond of.

I am feeling some ironic amusement though. If you went through various technology and multimedia forums in the past couple of years, the pro-pirate forces had declared bit torrenting dead and the entire future to be these file locker services. As anyone familiar with how spy and terrorist organizations operate, the easiest ones to roll up and eliminate are the highly centralized ones. That is one reason why they operate in cells. Painting big old targets on yourself is not particularly smart and that is what these companies did.

My suspicions are that we will see the file sharing sites gone or inaccessible from America in the very near future. Torrenting will increase with a move to decentralize magnet links becoming the new standard. All of this reminds me of Spy vs. Spy in Mad Magazine as Hollywood and the recording industry use the U.S. government against the pirates.

China Going Backwards

It has been fashionable in multiple circles to believe that China will take over the title of most powerful nation during this century. Much has been made of their economic growth and of their acquiring companies, land, and ports in other countries. This has presented an impression of an unstoppable juggernaut backed by the reality that they have become the main manufacturer of goods in the world. But does this mean China is ready or able to take over the lead?

I do not think so. Despite their growing military aggression in Asia, there are cracks appearing. With protests sporadically appearing in different regions, the specter of civil unrest has cast a long shadow across the very large country. In December, the village of Wukan rose up against land seizures and managed to make international news. That inspired another uprising in the nearby city of Haimen despite knowing they would be beaten by police.

It is no wonder that the authorities are spooked  for they have witnessed successful uprisings in Arab countries this past year. They too sit on a powder keg of poor and oppressed citizens. But what is interesting to me is that the latest uprisings are in in southern China, which is supposed to be the wealthy part of the nation.

Another intriguing tidbit of information is that the wealthy are looking to escape the country in the future. From other things I have read, there is a sense of fear that another peasant rebellion could happen. So we have the wealthy prepared to pull the handle on their personal ejection seats at the first sign of serious unrest.

So when President Hu wrote a piece saying that China is under cultural attack from the West and then the government restricts television broadcasts in order to present a more pure socialist message it made my antenna go up. This strikes me as being both a reaction to domestic control problems and preparations for conflict. The latter could be internal or external, with the latter being of particular concern to me.

It is not unknown for nations to attack others to bleed off internal pressures that have become too difficult to regulate. However, this may not be the conventional bombing or invading of another country kind of attack. The communists running China have been orchestrating cyber attacks on other countries for years. Asymmetric warfare is at the heart of Chinese military planning, being a theory of fighting a foe who is more powerful by using unconventional means. Right now, that means using cyber warfare against America.

Frankly, I do not think that will do a thing to vent social pressures at home. So the odds of an open confrontation with the United States to whip up patriotic fervor are increasing. While the OWS idiots focused on the spurious one percent here, the income disparities in China make us look well balanced by comparison.

With a housing bubble bigger than the one that popped here and a massive population that are truly dirt poor, China has problems too big to easily fix no matter how much state control is imposed. Actually, state control rarely fixes problems and just breeds more from what I have seen. Aggravating this is how they are driving out Western companies and nationalizing companies again. Wealth and power are being consolidated in the hands of an elite few, as is typical with socialist systems. It is sadly reminiscent of Orwell’s Animal Farm.

With Europe and the United States poised for even worse financial problems in 2012, China will become even more unstable as the buyers for their manufactured goods dry up. November and December saw drops in manufacturing there, so those ballyhooing increased manufacturing in the States should take a reality check, stat. Demand is still not coming back. The fact that Hu and company think that the US is deliberately taking economic hits to undermine them financially does not help things either.

An unstable China will be prone to doing things that would be out of character for them in recent decades. People in the West have forgotten the China that invaded their neighbors Vietnam and India. Suffice it to say, nobody in the region has though. There is quite a military build up going on throughout Asia right now due to Chinese naval aggression at sea.

I would like to be a fly on the wall in some of the intelligence briefings in the region. Even the cash strapped Philippines government is looking to get F-16 fighter jets because of what has been going on.

It is going to be an interesting year.

Kim Jong Il Has Died

The oppressive dictator of North Korea has escaped mortal justice and now the jockeying for power in the communist country begins in earnest. It is not surprising to see the markets in Asia going down out of fears of instability. One can only pray this offers a flicker of hope for the North Korean people.

It is difficult not to contrast his “accomplishments” in contrast to those of another leader who just died, Vaclav Havel. One died while clinging to power by starving his own people and the other died after having helped usher his country into democracy. If only there could be a Velvet Revolution on the Korean Peninsula, but I am afraid that is highly unlikely.

Odds, Ends and In-betweens

This has been a good week so far and it is Wednesday already so that means the majority of it has been good. It has been awhile since I could say that.

Sunday I got a ride to church and hung out with a young friend of mine and his girlfriend as we got his fancy new Onkyo home theater system to play nice with his new PC. A spare optical cable I had lying around turned out to be key in getting the signal out to the receiver. The Phillip's one he bought at Wal-Mart refused to convey a proper signal, so we decided it was probably defective.

Monday I bought an upgrade to the Cyberlink PowerDVD player that came with my Blu-ray drive since I was liking what it was capable of but wanted more features. PowerDVD 11 Ultra is a very nice upgrade and I am currently playing with its TrueTheater HD upscaling versus the capable ATI Avivo of my videocard. Depending on the video, it seams to do a better job when the content is of lower quality. More testing is needed before I can conclusively say more, but it is promising. It is now my go to video player for all formats.

Sorry, VLC – you have really fallen by the wayside of late.

That cheap optical cable I mentioned before?  Well, shockingly it turned out to work with the Razer Barracuda soundcard on my living room multimedia center PC I built with leftover parts a couple of years ago. Dolby Digital Live and DTS Interactive sound fantastic coming out of it, which breathes new life into streaming content from Hulu, YouTube, Crackle, and other places on the Web. All I can surmise is that the Barracuda pumps out more light than the Asus Xonar D1.

Tuesday my father and I had lunch with a friend from out neighboring county in Houston at the Crossroads Cafe and caught up on politics. I also encountered an amazing hashbrown omelet that was not only huge but had everything wrapped in the hashbrowns. I am still digesting it a day later.

Today we ate at the same place when we met with our State Representative, Greg Davids. It is going to be a strange election year for many reasons, but redistricting due to the census makes it weirder than usual. We do not know for sure where the districts will be until the courts rule on them. Hopefully, they will be more logical than the last court imposed ones from 2000.  Odds are that I will be in the same district as Greg, but the state senate is another question. I will hate to lose Jeremy Miller as my senator if it goes the way I suspect, but that’s life.

Now for something more sobering.  I have to agree with Glenn Reynolds last sentence. These are fast becoming perilous times when you cannot trust the election process anymore.

Over in Belgium a mass shooting took place that got next to no attention here in the States. So far it appears the shooter being a drug dealer about to go to prison again is the motivation, despite his Moroccan origins. The fact he was not a practicing Muslim indicates it wasn’t sudden jihad syndrome, but why did he have grenades and 9500 gun parts? It makes me suspect he dealt illegal weapons on the side to other drug dealers and criminals. Even the craziest of gun nuts do not have that many parts lying around.

In my opinion, Europe is slowing losing control to criminals due to their pervasive statism and gun control laws. Look how well those laws worked with a convict having possession of that kind of arsenal. There is always a way for criminals to arm themselves – always.

My prayers go out to those wounded and the loved ones of those killed.

Drone Follies

Iran has put the RQ-170 Sentinel on display for the world to see. Yes, one of America’s most secret aircraft is in their hands. Video here. From that it looks like it may have landed gear up rather than crashed. The airframe looks completely intact though. It also makes me wonder if the virus going around the Air Force base might be related to it. Could it have been hijacked?

Something of interest to me is the fact that it is painted in a yellow sand color. That would suggest daylight operations for the top secret reconnaissance drone and a great deal of belief in its stealth abilities. Also interesting is the used of a radar scattering grid on the intake like the F-117ANighthawk had. This is a very low observable aircraft. So much for stealth being a magical shield.

This is up there with the Gary Powers U-2 shoot down in the early 1960’s. Now I assume Russia and China will be bidding on access to the drone, if they haven’t already.  You would have thought there would be a self destruct device in the RQ-170. This is embarrassing.

Full video follows:

RQ-170 Sentinel on Display in Iran

Drone Shot Down by Iran?

Show me the pictures or it did not happen is my response. Claiming to do a thing for propaganda purposes is not something unknown with the Iranian government. What makes it interesting is the claim that it was a RQ-170 and that it was forced down mostly intact.

If true, it would be a coup for them in more ways than one since it has advanced stealth construction and materials. While I am no fan on relying on drones, I am skeptical that they succeed in shooting down a stealth aircraft. There will be quite a few repercussions if this does turn out to be true.

I am amused that all the photos I have seen from the news agencies reporting this have shown anything but a RQ-170 Sentinel. So far I have seen decidedly unstealthy Predators from the clueless media. You would think they are able to use Google to find the right bird!

UPDATE:

It appears the Iranians may have gotten their hands on a RQ-170 after all. According to The Telegraph, NATO has admitted to losing control of a drone over western Afghanistan last week. No admission of a shoot down, but a crash has not been ruled out. Looks like we just gave Iran a free peek into top secret stealth technology.

Oh and this is what the drone looks like, for those searching for a picture.

Gaddafi Is Dead

According to the latest news, it really appears to be him. Warning, graphic pictures at the link. The gold plated .45 seems to be a strong identifier to me and it looks like him despite all the damage.

It has been a long time coming for this certifiable lunatic. I remember when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up and the Berlin disco bombing for that matter too. The world is a better place with him and his son gone, but I have a bad feeling about Libya.

After watching Egypt slide following their revolution, this one looks even messier. Islamic extremists will be looking to take power and one way or the other, they will.

For the moment, at least there is the potential of change for the better for the Libyan people. It is up to them now.

Productive Pain

Living with chronic pain is not pleasant, no matter how you look at it. But there is pain and then there is pain from actually doing things. The last two days I’ve hurt quite a bit because I’ve been doing some physical activity to make up for lost time.

It is all yard related, except for taking down my filthy blinds and deciding replacing them was easier than cleaning them. We bought some Colorado Blue Spruce and Black Hills Spruce pine trees to plant as a mini windbreak. Three of them went in the ground yesterday just in time for frost last night. The fourth and last one is indoors for the moment and awaits the removal of a diseased Asian Elm tree – if we can get a neighbor with a chainsaw to help out.

Speaking of sawing, a replacement pole saw and lopper finally was purchased a couple of months ago. Tuesday was my first chance to use it and I discovered to my dismay that my recent slide in health is worse than I realized. It was torture using it and one oak tree branch will take multiple days to get through.

No, it is not very thick being six inches in diameter or so. I am just that weak now. Oy.

Back to the frost. Last night set records for lows in some places around the area. We could use some global warming right about now. Pity it is junk science since humanity always prospers in warm periods.

Prosperity would be nice, but the coming storm is nearly upon us. China is going to be liquidating their U.S. treasury bond holdings. This shows that borrowing to increase our national debt is not going to work anymore. But that is not stopping the Fed from assisting in bailing out European banks. The insanity continues until everything falls down, I suppose.

At least the view from my window is nice with the blinds removed. It is amazing how plastic attracts dust that never lets go. I made the mistake of trying to dust them with a Webster extendable duster yesterday. The clouds of dust that arose could have felled a horse and drove me from the room.

I had purchased them close to twenty years ago to be able to vary sunlight since my eyes are very sensitive to light. But years of working on pain tolerance has helped a bit with that so I am ready to evict the things in favor of Asian blinds. Temporary plastic fake reed blinds (left overs from upgrading the dining room twelve years ago) will go up while I budget to get the real thing.

I’m thinking of painted bamboo ones but need to check my finances first.

Egad, the windows are dirty. Something will have to be done about that. Also have tomatoes to can today. So despite all the pain, at least it has been a productive week. That is something I have not been able to write down in some time.

That is worth the pain.

Fear of Change

Walter Russel Mead has a must read on the Oslo attacks up at The American Interest. Go read it.

Another Tim McVeigh but in Norway

With the body count soaring in Oslo to 92 at the latest count, it appears that nationalism has finally reared its ugly head in Europe. Not that it has been hiding, but the neo Nazi types haven’t been blowing things up or shooting people in this manner. Unfortunately, nationalism is always just under the surface in xenophobic Europe – especially in the North.

The media is wanting to make it out to be a Christian fundamentalist motivation for Anders Behring Breivik, but I think they’ll find it more to be a reaction to Muslim immigrants. I’ve known Norwegian Americans who are extremely racist and view the Northern European stock to be superior to all other races. So I might be a bit biased there.

Ever since I became aware of the lack of assimilation by foreign immigrants of Muslim descent in Europe, I’ve been concerned. Europeans, despite their vaunted championing of human rights, have not been socially welcoming to the hired help. Instead of using the “melting pot” concept of integration, the newcomers where essentially confined to ghettos. That’s never worked out well anywhere for increasing tolerance, understanding, or more importantly -- upward mobility in a society.

Culture clashes are always fraught with friction, but in Europe it has always involved violence on a large scale at some point. Pogroms against Jews, the Nazi extermination of minority groups, and the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia are recent examples of an old story there. My fear is that one day we will see ethnic clashes in the old countries that end up bringing back fascist governments.

Right now I’m hoping this butcher was a sole actor and that it wasn’t an organized conspiracy. Governments in the West have their hands full enough with Islamist extremists.

Once again, I find myself only being able to pray for people that have gone through something horrible.

UPDATED

It looks like Breivek hated a lot of people, not just Muslims. He also hated Nazis and Marxists, lumping them all together while having neo-Nazi connections. It is starting to look more like Jarod Loughner rather than McVeigh, but not as obviously crazy. Definitely some serious cognitive dissonance though.

There is also a question of whether his Facebook account was changed after his name was released to include Christian and Conservative on his profile. Lulzsec or Anonymous involved? Hard to tell the way “ends justify the means” has gotten to be a standard in our world.

Interpol will be setting up a task force on non-Islamic terror and some are getting paranoid over it. If they haven’t been tracking the white supremacists and nationalists already, what in the world is wrong with them? While it may be used as a political weapon (what isn’t these days?), there has been a clear need for this for years if not decades. At least we keep an eye on ours over here, despite them being a fading threat since the Oklahoma City bombing.

Massive Explosion in Oslo, Norway

One dead and several injured according to early reports. My suspicions is that it will be found to be Islamist terrorists behind the blast which appears at first glance to have been a car bomb.

Such is the fate of those who appease. Norway and Sweden have ceded control of large urban areas to Muslim militants for years now with no entry orders to their police forces. For all the politically correct teachings out there, the simple reality is that only strength is respected. That is a sad truth about human beings that can’t be ignored for long. So showing weakness will always be taken advantage of.

I expect more of these attacks to ramp up by the end of the year across the world. Why? The debacle in Libya has exposed just how weak the West really is. Meanwhile, President Obama has a lower approval rating in the Middle East than President Bush did. Only the “strong horse” is given respect and the current administration is viewed as being very weak.

Interesting times, interesting times…

UPDATED

The body count is rising as an apparently related shooting at a socialist youth group camp associated with Norway's Labor Party happened several hours after the bombing. Initial reports are confused (the usual with this kind of event) and the shooter may be blond and blue eyed. If true, that could indicate a home grown jihadi, or worse yet, the beginnings of reactionary violence by white supremacist types.

When the Levy Breaks

Watching the Berlin Wall being attacked with sledgehammers as East and West Germany spontaneously reunited left an indelible impression on me in the early 1990’s. The following Russian revolution that took down the Soviet Union had memorable images as well, especially of Boris Yeltsin leading the rebellion. But the unexpected fall of the Soviet Union was a surprise to all and even today it is somewhat of a mystery of why it happened. Leon Aron has written an intriguing theory over at Foreign Policy.

In it, he puts forth the idea that it was a desire to morally reform the Soviet Union that led to its downfall. This is a fascinating idea given the events in Arab countries right now. Economics is usually cited as a causal factor in revolutions by our liberal media and intelligentsia, which reflects their Marx influenced thinking. But what if it is something else entirely?

Lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that governments and businesses are supported by faith in them, or confidence, rather than actual merit or results. As long as confidence remains in them, they stay afloat. But once that is lost, the beginning of the end is soon to be seen. Parliamentary systems of government illustrate this rather well, but it applies to all forms of government.

The money quote of the article:

"Dignity Before Bread!" was the slogan of the Tunisian revolution. The Tunisian economy had grown between 2 and 8 percent a year in the two decades preceding the revolt. With high oil prices, Libya on the brink of uprising also enjoyed an economic boom of sorts. Both are reminders that in the modern world, economic progress is not a substitute for the pride and self-respect of citizenship. Unless we remember this well, we will continue to be surprised -- by the "color revolutions" in the post-Soviet world, the Arab Spring, and, sooner or later, an inevitable democratic upheaval in China -- just as we were in Soviet Russia. "The Almighty provided us with such a powerful sense of dignity that we cannot tolerate the denial of our inalienable rights and freedoms, no matter what real or supposed benefits are provided by 'stable' authoritarian regimes," the president of Kyrgyzstan, Roza Otunbayeva, wrote this March. "It is the magic of people, young and old, men and women of different religions and political beliefs, who come together in city squares and announce that enough is enough."

I would submit that the United States is not immune to this. With the rise of the Tea Parties, a direct challenge to the current system is being made. A large number of people feel that the wheels are coming off of our society and that corruption feeds the growth of the government. Even discounting the vocal protesters, I’ve run into many of the apathetic middle who no longer trust the government to do anything right. This isn’t the “malaise” that Jimmy Carter spoke of around 35 years ago. Instead, it is a feeling of resigned resentment.

Technically, we have a system designed for easy change. Unfortunately, sprawling bureaucracy and Obama’s attempts at an imperial presidency have done too much damage to the system. The system of checks and balances between the branches of government have been compromised to the point of no return.

Nobody saw the fall of the Soviet Union coming until it happened. Are we ignoring the same signs in their infancy here? I wonder.

There is also the problem of revolutions rarely delivering on what was promised. They are glamorized by historians and the media, but tend to unleash the darkest aspects of the human soul with oppression and bloodletting being the end result. In Russia, Putin is poised to openly rule again as an elected dictator. Not exactly what was hoped for when the Soviet system was dismantled.

I can’t say if Aron is correct, but his ideas are very interesting to say the least. We need to be looking around and re-evaluating events like this to find lessons. While we always live in uncertain times, things seem to be more unstable than usual and I have the impression that the world is about to be plunged into great turmoil. Being a history buff, this is exciting but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it!

What a Tsunami Does to a Nuclear Power Plant

Over at The Mainichi Daily News they have some amazing photos of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant being hit by the tidal wave. The car being throne up into the building is particularly impressive and give an idea of scale.  It truly shows how gigantic the wave was and it was amazing that events weren’t worse at the reactor – even as bad as they were. 

Looking at this and other articles there, I realized that I want to post about such events here and not on Facebook like I did in March. Things get lost there and aren’t easy to find again for posterity, since it is a very superficial place. Events like the devastation of Japan by the tsunami is not something to readily forget, but human memory is what it is and that is limited.

It will be interesting to see if I can divorce the reality of what happened there from the fantasy of Godzilla movies the next time I watch one. Watching the footage and viewing the photographs was surreal, because in a way I’d already seen things like that happen in Japan thanks to the movies.  These photos did not help with that and I wonder if I’ll be able to enjoy those films again.

Good News for the World

The butcher of Srebrenica has finally been arrested after all these years. Ratko Mladic, the rat who commanded the Serbian troops, was captured by Serbian intelligence and will be extradited to face war crimes charges. While the timing is suspect, since Serbia wants to join the European Union and had plenty of opportunity to nab him, it is still glad tidings.  I remember ranting at the Clinton administration to do something about “ethnic cleansing,” which was a brand new phrase at the time and waiting for a small eternity to see action taken.

For people who think modern countries can always peacefully work things out internally, the disintegration of Yugoslavia should be a cautionary example. It is a very fine line between civilized and barbaric behaviors – something that should never be forgotten and carefully monitored.