Ain’t Gonna Study
A gulf between the military and the university is not healthy for American democracy. The constitutional order requires a civil-military relationship that protects military professionalism and autonomy, while also honoring the principle and practice of civilian control. Public awareness of national-security matters allows for a more effective partnership between the military and society. A public ignorant of the proper role of the military can lead to three major problems: uncritical support for military actions, or what Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, calls the “new American militarism”; endorsement of an opposite, antimilitary ideology that perceives the armed forces as evil or as the “other”; or a simple lack of knowledge regarding the military and strategic-security matters. National security is the cardinal duty of the state, and debate about the appropriate means of achieving security is a matter of vital importance to us all.
-Miles Lascaux
“You’ll Die, But Not in May.”
Romanian proverb. Written, no doubt, on a day like today.
Could It Be?
A GOP youth movement that’s genuine and not a joke?
Republican leaders frantically seeking to rebrand their party might want to swing their attention from Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney to a feisty young Republican who has never been elected to anything: Meghan McCain.
The 24-year-old daughter of U.S. Sen. John McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential candidate, is a regular political blogger and most certainly not her mother Cindy’s serene, St. John-suit-wearing stereotype of a Republican woman.
In brash blog posts on the Daily Beast — “The GOP doesn’t understand sex” — and outpouring of posts on Twitter, she has described herself as a pro-sex, “pro-life, pro-gay-marriage Republican,” one who experts say may be at the forefront of a new GOP breed: the “Meghan McCain Republican.”
That GOP faction is younger and interested in fiscal responsibility and less government involvement in people’s lives, while supporting environmentalism and civic engagement. They’re part of the millennial generation, the largest and most diverse generation in American history, whose voters — born starting in the early 1980s — cast ballots for Barack Obama by a more than 2-to-1 ratio.
I guess my first question is, how do you tell them from centrist/moderate Democrats? But perhaps the country’s swung so far (back) to the left that that is the only viable right-side position.
-Miles Lascaux
Gathering the Facts on Healthcare – an Introduction
In recent months, much of my day-job has dealt with analyzing a fairly specific problem in the healthcare field. Doing this research has led me to become more interested in the far more politicized debate about healthcare reform in this country – particularly those aspects having to do with cost management and the national budget deficit.
As an agnostic on the topic of healthcare reform, it occurred to me that I could perform a useful service by simply trying to gather relevant facts about this debate. I doubt any facts are going to make me a believer, one way or another, at this point; I’ve seen too much already to think that there’s a simple or even a complex solution to this very intractable problem.
Nonetheless, over the coming weeks I’ll be posting bits and pieces of what I see, in what should mostly be bite-sized amounts. For starters, I’d like to recommend recent blog posts by two people who have demonstrated a strong commitment to facts over ideology when it comes to this debate:
Dave Schuler on the recent trade organization proposal to decrease price increases.
Tyler Cowen on direct payments for autism treatments.
~ Maxwell
Not Another Great Depression
Economic historian Price Fishback posted the first of three guest columns on the Freakonomics blog yesterday:
Over the past couple of decades, every time we have experienced a slowdown in the American economy, the media mentioned the possibility that this is the next Great Depression. Maybe this is a natural response to the relative lack of downturns over the past 20 years. After experiencing a downturn once every three to seven years for nearly two centuries, the U.S. economy has been averaging a downturn about once every nine or ten years since the early 1980’s. As declines in the economy have become rarer, perhaps people have become more sensitive to them.
(Check out the links to his earlier guest posts about the chances that a stimulus package will work and the New Deal-era Home Owners Loan Corporation, too.)
~Randy
News Flash
Prominent social conservative figure, speaking at an event for President Bush, says those who vocally oppose his administration commit “treason,” compares them to Bin Laden, calls them domestic terrorists, suggests they be tortured, and hopes for their deaths.
The thing is, I suppose, to some people, that is the height of comedy.
-Miles Lascaux
If This Blog Were Called “Change” . . .
. . . it’d have to be illustrated with nickels, dimes, and quarters. It turns out that if politics doesn’t go deep enough to address what ails us, only economics does. Or not “only”: economics is a symptom of human nature, or better yet, of the interface at which human nature collides with the laws of impersonal, if not objective, reality . . . and then what? Either submits (with secret relief?) or tries to bend, break, or dodge them.
But here we are, about as un-“ambiancey” as you can get, mostly talking about money. So that’s where it’s going, and that must be where it belongs. Talking about the economy is a way of talking about everything, one that has the advantage of being embodied and concrete, practical and at the same time wildly philosophical.
OK, so apropos: @blondaccountant, whom I’m following on Twitter, has a long rant/thread that takes off from a 1994 GAO report, “Financial Derivatives: Actions Needed to Protect the Financial System” [PDF], that now sounds like a bureaucrat-prophet crying in the wilderness. Attention was so not paid.
What I’m thinking about at the moment is what I’d call no-tomorrowism. It’s our own personal end-times mindset. We can’t bear our lack of knowledge of or control over what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the fact that we’re not going to be here one of these tomorrows (even though our children and grandchildren are), so we (a lot of us, enough to have momentum) live as if there is no tomorrow. I sometimes wonder if the more fervent end-times believers almost wish there weren‘t a tomorrow, for some of the same human reasons: we can’t predict or control it; we won’t be a part of it; as the Buddha said (approximately), “Everything you care about will change, fall apart, and be taken from you.”
And ironically, unavoidably, our no-tomorrowism becomes a major factor in shaping tomorrow. Maybe making it worse, in some ways, than it has to be. Maybe making it better, in some ways, than if we were more prudent. What do you think?
We’re exiles in our handmade history, outcasts from the old paradise of cycles, the hundreds of thousands of years when what went around, came around, again and again. There was the occasional natural catastrophe. The occasional schism where members of one tribe stopped speaking to each other and became two. The occasional destabilizing discovery. The constant nagging fear of witchcraft and predation. But also, the great natural world that never changed much in one person’s memory, that would always be there, per omnia saecula saeculorum, world without end, amen.
We got on a juggernaut called History, headed for the stars.
Dude, Where’s My Nose?
Ever since I saw the “before” picture of the face-transplant lady, I’m having trouble using my former favorite smile emoticon :)
~ amba
Not “Happy Mothers’ Day. Not “Happy Mothers Day.”
As Sissy Willis (Sisu) pointed out on Twitter this morning, Mother’s Day was deliberately established with the apostrophe firmly between the R and the S. It is to be celebrated one mother at a time. (Or as Anne Lamott would have it, bird by bird.)
This is a stunning vindication for the copy editors of the world. PUNCTUATION MATTERS. Not only is it a form of musical scoring or choreographic notation, telling your inner voice and your thought when to flow and where to pause; it is also a tiny lever moving worlds of meaning, a focusing device directing your attention precisely where it belongs.
On you, Mom. This one’s for you: my one mother, my fellow copy editor. I love and honor you — not just today.
~ amba/Annie
Ambiance 