The Highlight of the Grammys

I actually considered terminating this blog. For six years I’ve ranted about the pathetic and dysfunctional state of pretty much all American institutions— public education, and organized religion, and public health / medicine, and giant financial corporations, and the “traditional” heterosexual American family, and labor unions, and the United States Government together with their chief client— the Pentagon. It’s not that I’ve run out of critical things to say. It’s just that so many bright thinkers now are all saying the same thing, and for me to continue would be merely to overstate the obvious. I might as well blog every day that rich and healthy is better than poor and sick.

So now I’ve been reduced to blogging about the Grammys. Okay, going into it I knew it would consist of non-stop renditions of “I Will Always Love You.” What I didn’t foresee was that they would never once mention Dolly Parton who actually wrote the song and sang it in a film a full ten years before The Bodyguard. There I go being critical again. But let’s face it— the Grammys wasn’t about musicology. It was about idolatry, and the idol wasn’t Dolly Parton.

That’s not to say that the Grammys were a waste of my time. I got to see the most amazing and creative commercial I’ve ever seen on television. I’m referring to the animated Chipotle commercial done with a voice-over song sung by Willie Nelson. Yes— that one with the pink pigs stylized to look like piggy banks. Nothing aired during the Super Bowl this year, or any other year, was this good in my opinion. Unfortunately, I’m willing to bet that the spot will prove to be a commercial failure. It was far too intelligent and subtle to sell very many burritos.

Okay, Now I Finally “Get it”

I had the U.S. military pegged all wrong. I thought the function of the military was to preserve our national security by maintaining sufficient firepower to repel any foreign invasion, and to keep a nuclear deterrent force that would assure the destruction of any foreign nuclear power that attacked us. But dumb me. Now I know that this picture is SO cold war. Threatened by defense budget cuts, Panetta and his Republican toadies have given us a true picture of our military strategy— which is indistinguishable from our foreign policy. We need 800 billion a year, not just to stay safe, but (in Panetta’s words) to “maintain our foreign commitments.” We have a military presence in 130 nations, which is 60% of all the nations on the planet. These are not Marines guarding an embassy. These are American troops and weapons meant to assure the security of foreign countries so they won’t need to waste their own money and resources to provide strong armies and weapons systems and military infrastructures of their own.

There’s a high school analogy for everything in life. I used to think that the United States was analogous to the high school bully who threatened others with force and intimidation to get his own way. That’s the wrong analogy. The United States is the smarmy but clueless rich kid who buys lunch for everyone else and bribes schoolmates with whatever it takes to make him popular. Now that I know my tax money goes to buy American popularity in the world community, I have a solution for the problems of Iran and North Korea. Why don’t we just ask them how much we need to pay them to be our friends?

Stupidity or Incompetence?

Each time Obama talks about reducing spending on the U.S. military, the Republicans carry the water for the Pentagon and declare that this puts American safety in jeopardy. Only two logical underpinnings can explain the enormity of the Pentagon budget. Maybe the U.S. really DOESN’T need to spend 10 times more than any other nation on earth on its military in order to be as safe as everyone else, in which case our level of military spending is just plain stupid. Or else, we DO need to spend 10 times more in order to be safe, in which case our military is just plain incompetent. It’s one or the other.

Some Thoughts About That "Big Footprint"

Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, warns that cutting the defense budget will reduce our navy to the smallest fleet since 1914, and will reduce our standing army to the smallest number of troops since 1940. Actually, that makes perfect sense. In 1914, we were ramping up our navy to face the looming threat of Germany, which had the most powerful navy on the high seas, including the world’s first operational fleet of submarines. Similarly, in 1940, we could see that we would soon face the German army as well as the Japanese. At that time, Germany had the world’s largest and most powerful military machine in the world, and Japan was number two in military might. Those situations required what West Point now refers to in buzzword-speak as a “big footprint.”

Fast forward to 2011. We are told that we still need a “big footprint” to fight the threat imposed by— drum roll, please— the Taliban. According to the Pentagon’s latest assessment, the number of Taliban currently in Afghanistan is about 10,000. Oh, and by the way, the Taliban has no navy. In fact, they have virtually no military infrastructure whatsoever. We’re not talking, here, about pre-war Germany or Japan. And we're most certainly not talking about the Cold War Soviet Union. The plain fact is that America maintains the world’s biggest military simply because it has become the main part of our national identity. It makes us feel good. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make us feel safe.

Getting a Little Sick of Seal Team Six

As a quick follow-up to my previous post about the Pentagon, and about last weekend’s loss of 30 American servicemen in the helicopter shoot down, I just need to say that I’m getting sick of hearing about Seal Team Six. I feel sad for the families that have lost a son or daughter who joined the National Guard and died later in Iraq or Afghanistan, and then watched as the nation pretty much ignored the sacrifice because it wasn’t sufficiently “spectacular.” I guess that if you’re in the National Guard, you’re not “bad ass” enough to impress the media. The Seal Team Six members might be the best warriors in our military, but their lives are not the most important lives. One of the things that made America great during World War II was that our nation honored every single sacrifice as though it were equal to every other sacrifice.

Dirty Little Truths About Pentagon Funding

When the twelve-member super committee fails to cut another 1.5 trillion later this year, then presumably automatic cuts in Medicare and Defense will kick in. To preempt the Defense part of that, Secretary Leon Panetta warned us two days ago that cuts in Defense would threaten our national security. Now, it’s universally known that the U.S. spends more on its military than all the rest of the world combined spends on their respective armies and navies and such. No other nation on the planet spends even a fifth of what we spend militarily. So here’s my naïve question for today. How come all these other nations— clearly underfunded by Panetta’s standards— are not being overtaken by aggressors intent on stripping away their security and freedom? How do other countries manage to protect themselves on the cheap? And if they can do it, why can’t we do it?

The answer to that question is in another dirty little secret (America is filled with dirty little secrets). The United States military is NOT primarily about protecting our security or maintaining our freedom. That’s just patriotic feel-good nonsense. It’s all about jobs. The Pentagon is our nation’s biggest jobs program. Manufacturing all those bullets and bombs, as well as the fancy equipment to deliver those commodities to a target— all of this keeps people employed. A lot of people. And here’s the fascinating subtlety. It doesn’t matter whether the U.S. wins its wars or loses them because the consumption of bullets and bombs stays the same in either scenario, just as long as the war doesn’t end. Actually, either an outright victory or defeat is negative for jobs because then the consumption slows down or ends, and there’s a limit to how much you can stockpile. This is why the U.S. is always at war in at least one foreign country, and why the wars go on so long. C’mon, does anyone in their right mind believe the United States wages a war for ten years because it lacks the firepower necessary to take down an enemy in less than a decade?

And here’s another subtlety. A war can come to a stop (a big job killer) if our enemy runs out of their bullets or bombs, so over the years an ingenious system has evolved that allows our own bullets and bombs to find their way into channels that supply the people we are fighting. This effectively doubles the consumption. Did anyone out there think that al Qaeda or the Taliban had their own munitions plants? Of course not.

The only drawback to the entire operation is the death and injury of the troops we hire to do the fighting. But it’s surprising how little most Americans care about this. We never see the protests that were so common in the Vietnam era. Yesterday, 30 Americans were killed in a single incident, but next week people will forget it. The 30 who died were in a helicopter brought down by an RPG in Taliban hands. We’ll never know if that RPG was “made in America,” because the Pentagon will lie about it if they learn the truth.

What Did Watson Really Tell Us?

I believe it was the most astonishing and significant demonstration of hard science since the first atomic test in July of 1945. I’m talking about the IBM computer, Watson, and its three night test on the TV show, Jeopardy. Few TV viewers could even comprehend what it took to assemble the background data and then accurately connect the relevant points using self-generated algorithms. But, whereas the first atomic test was only seen by government insiders, my fear is that nobody from federal agencies other than the military was watching Watson’s performance.

If you doubt that the U.S. government is incompetent, then you probably don’t know about criminals in prison who collect social security checks and unemployment benefits, or federal workers who double dip by collecting disability payments because they, supposedly, can’t work, or doctors who bill Medicare for imaginary procedures. And the list goes on and on. All of this could be prevented by a computer system with less than a millionth of Watson’s capability, and the savings through fraud prevention would more than pay for the investment many times over. It’s not that the government doesn’t know about computer capability, or that there isn’t a willingness to spend the money. The CIA and NSA and the Pentagon all have computers which, I’m sure, would put Watson to shame. So why won’t we use advanced computer systems to do things other than detect foreign threats and blow enemies to smithereens?

Why Do They Think the Truth Is So Unworkable?

There’s an old adage that says, “In war, the first casualty is the truth.” The problem is that modern institutions (government, business corporations, and religions) all seem to look at everything as a war. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all these institutions have systemic lying as one of their primary functions or core values, but I will say that the truth is looked upon as their enemy. Whistleblowers don’t get their power and their 15 minutes of fame by lying. Whistleblowers threaten institutions by telling the truth about institutional lies, and that’s considered dangerous.

It wasn’t always this way. During World War II, Edward R. Murrow reported bad news for war-torn and bomb-ravaged London with nightly candor, while Gabriel Heater gave his unvarnished assessment of U.S. setbacks in the South Pacific with no attempt to sugar coat the losses. By honestly admitting some of the truth to the American people, the real and essential “secrets” like the Manhattan Project could be safely kept under wraps. That’s because the American people, and people in general, aren’t totally stupid. When they are fed a constant diet of happy talk, they develop an intense hunger and craving for some real undiluted truth, and this is grounded in a certain kind of intuition that people have about happy talk. They instinctively know it’s mostly a lie. This isn’t being cynical, it’s being wise.

In the last four months, we’ve seen what happens when the truth is finally exposed after all the “happy talk” efforts have been tried, only to fail. Who can forget the images of the Vatican during Holy Week, 2010, as the Pope tried to swim against the flood of pedophilia accusations that poured in from around the world? You could almost sense his frustration that his traditional authority and power to burn heretics at the stake had been taken away from him. And this was followed by revelations about the devious inner workings and vulgar bonus payouts that defined Wall Street, even as that institution demolished a half century of American prosperity. Then came the BP oil spill. If happy talk and lies from CEO Tony Hayward could soak up oil, then the Gulf of Mexico disaster could have been minimized. Trying to repair the corporate image, BP hastily hired some local Cajun goobers to appear in the BP television commercials in the hope that happy talk would still carry the day if it came from someone without a British accent.

Which brings me to Julian Assange and his WikiLeak revelations about the Afghan War. We should ignore the Pentagon assertion that the leaked information will threaten American lives. The military always makes this claim when any truth whatsoever comes out about the conduct of a war. The only thing threatened will be Pentagon credibility. Now we know that at least one helicopter was brought down by a heat seeking missile supplied by Iran. News flash to the Pentagon— the Taliban already knew about this, and if young American servicemen who fly on helicopters don’t know about this, then they have a right to know the truth.

So here’s the question. Why do they think the truth is so unworkable? It’s because the true believers who populate all modern institutions think it’s their God given right to insult the intelligence of others outside the walls of their own particular institutional fortress, and to do so with impunity.

Ready or Not, Here Comes the Future

For the most part, historically significant events never happen in an isolated context, without the influence of everything else that happens before and during that time in history. Nothing happens in a vacuum. It’s because of this that the future is really not so hard to predict if past and present circumstances are interpreted properly, and at this particular time in history there are undisputable and clearly evident facts that we can string together to read the future more accurately than ever before.

Consider these facts. The global population has more than tripled in the last sixty years, growing by more than 4 billion human beings. Fact number two: most all of these additional 4 billion people live at an extreme poverty level in shanty towns, inside and around gigantic cities that are larger than anything that existed fifty years ago. Fact number three: television, Internet, and other mass media has become so ubiquitous that, despite extreme poverty, almost every disadvantaged human on earth knows about the high standard of living in Europe and the United States. Fact number four: human nature being what it is, every disadvantaged human on earth aspires to have what we have in Europe and America. Fact number five: in order for all of earth’s 7 billion people to live like we do in Europe and America, it would require the natural resources and energy production capacity of six more earth-size planets. And finally, fact number six: since we don’t have access to any planet but this one, we can expect the aspirations of the disadvantaged to play out in conflict between the haves and the have-nots.

None of this comes as any surprise to the people who do their truculent work inside the Pentagon. It’s the main reason why the United States spends more on weapons of war than all the rest of the world’s nations combined. The only question to be answered is this: are we really willing to exterminate huge numbers of people just to keep what we’ve got?

Every modern problem, from radical fundamentalism in both Islam and Christianity, to climate changes, and economic meltdown, and depletion of natural resources, and ubiquitous corruption in seats of power… all of these problems have their origins in the growth of population and the disparity of living conditions across the planet. And the secondary problem is that most countries including the United States are now becoming ungovernable, and most large corporations are unmanageable, and most religions are unreasonable. Welcome to the future.

A Brief History of World War III... 9-11 Was Worse Than We Thought

The essence of naiveté is the failure to imagine. We had always assumed that our enemies were distant and compartmentalized. We assumed that our sophisticated and undetectable surveillance watched them, and distantly tracked their movements and accessed their authenticity while wielding our own unimaginable authority, endeavoring all the while to verify predicted tropisms that had been perfectly foreseen in our war game planning.

Looking back now, the surprising thing about 9-11 is that, at the time, it came as such a surprise. Pearl Harbor had also come as a complete surprise, but that attack had come from a distant island with a small population of only 75 million who plotted against us from across the largest ocean on earth. But in the half century since Pearl Harbor, the number of human beings on the planet had tripled, and modern air travel had put every spot on earth within a day’s travel time. We felt safe because we spent more on our military-industrial machine than the entire rest of the world was spending on their combined armaments. We had a military presence in 130 foreign countries. These were supposed to be sovereign nations, but we figured that was okay with everyone because we were the good guys. We had perfectly positioned ourselves to prevent another Pearl Harbor. Problem is, we lacked imagination. The 9-11 attackers were able to conceive, plan, organize, orchestrate, implement, and execute something that our superstar Generals in the Pentagon could not even imagine. By thinking at least five steps ahead of us, they had finally learned how to fight us, but it took them 48 years to do it.

In 1948 when Saudi Arabia started shipping oil abroad, and the true extent of the Saudi oil deposits could be calculated, the motive was there for eventually going to war. The founding of the country of Israel gave us a kind of forward operating base, and our policy of propping-up the so-called democratic regimes in Egypt and Lebanon was intended to give us allies in the area. As each of these things came into being, we thought that they were stabilizing forces working to our benefit. For the Muslims and Arabs in the area, however, our efforts in the Middle East only intensified their suspicion and distrust of the U.S.A.

Then in 1953, the CIA clandestinely deposed the rightful ruler of Iran and installed the Shah. To the extent that you can trace the origin of 9-11 to a single event, that was probably the one, and the average American didn't even notice. We were too busy watching Senator Joe McCarthy on TV and worrying about whether our neighbor might be a Communist, because we thought the Communists would be our adversary in the next war. Little did we know that war was already underway and the real enemy was totally off our radar. We would stay clueless until September 11, 2001.

The enemy that would eventually become al-Qaeda received a huge boost in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution in Tehran. This was the catalyst for the spawning of a radical fundamentalist faction within the Islamic religion, and that radicalized minority might have stayed bottled up in Iran if it had not been for the emergence and growth of the Internet. With the Internet, the means finally existed for hard core Muslim fundamentalist radicals to link up with each other from anywhere on earth. The result was al-Qaeda, and the result of al-Qaeda was 9-11.

Looking forward we know three things, none of them positive for the United States. Thanks to the success of the 9-11 attack, al-Qaeda now knows that even a small amount of destruction will be magnified a thousand fold by disruption in the complexities of our culture. Secondly, al-Qaeda has learned to franchise itself so that future attacks can come from any location and any culture on earth. And lastly, al-Qaeda has seen that the American intelligence apparatus is vulnerable because it lacks the ability to connect the dots.

Human events don’t happen in the isolation of a vacuum, and 9-11 was no exception to that rule.

The Modern-Day Version of Cleopatra's Barge

Five months to go until the 2008 election, and new polls show that 82% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. This causes me to ask two questions. The first and most obvious question is, “What the hell is going through the optimistic minds of the 18% who still don’t get it?” And the second and more subtle question is, “Would the 82% do what was necessary to turn things around if they knew what it would take?” Would they ever vote for a candidate who wanted to cut the defense budget by 70%? Would they follow a leader who suggested mothballing our carrier fleet? Could they ever be seduced away from the national love affair with the military?

It’s no secret to most Americans that we spend more on our military-industrial machine than the entire rest of the world spends on their combined armaments. We have a military presence in 130 foreign countries. These are supposed to be sovereign nations, but we figure our invasiveness should be okay with everyone because we’re the good guys. Anyway, that’s our story, and we’re sticking to it. The funny thing is, the ancient Romans viewed the world the same way. So how did we get to this point?

In 1947, the War Department and the Department of the Navy merged into what we now call the Department of Defense. The primary reason for this consolidation was to raise the status and clout of the military arm of Government so that it could compete for funding with State Department. In 1947, State had seven times the budget of Defense. And for the next 44 years of the Cold War, the strategy made sense. The problem is, the Cold War ended. But nothing changed militarily for the United States. And now the iconic personal image that America presents to the rest of the world is not that of a businessman or scientist or statesman, but the image of a fully-battle-armored Marine. The U.S. State Department is now nothing but a footnote. As for the rest of the world, they are too busy making America irrelevant to care what we do militarily. They know that global influence no longer correlates with military power.

The world’s largest publically-traded corporation and the world’s tallest skyscraper are both Chinese. In neighboring India, Bollywood has passed Hollywood as the film capital of the world. Six universities in India provide graduate education in science and engineering that surpasses MIT and Cal Tech. At least three dozen industrialized nations have a lower mortality rate than the U.S. because of better healthcare systems. Toyota is now the most successful car maker, and 54 nations have more efficient railroad and airline infrastructures. The ten largest shopping malls on earth are outside of the United States. Most multi-billionaires are foreign, not American. And the American dollar is quickly losing status as the major global currency. Quite simply, the rest of the world looked at everything that projected American dominance- all of our financial and cultural and technological triumphs- and they worked diligently to surpass us in these areas. But the most visible icon that was intended to project American dominance, our Naval super-carrier fleet, was profoundly ignored by the rest of the world. Nobody outside of the United States considers an aircraft carrier to be anything but a truculent modern-day version of Cleopatra’s barge.

And here’s the final irony. The United States has the raw power to destroy every human being on earth, but our Pentagon can’t win a modern 4th generation war. For those countries and cultures that still believe in projecting themselves through violence, they have learned during the last seven years that their wars can be waged on the cheap, using nothing more than brilliant imagination and handmade explosive weapons, and sometimes just suicidal commitment. Trying to intimidate that kind of enemy with an aircraft carrier is like threatening a pesky house fly with a ball-peen hammer.

In early 2007, the Pentagon released an estimate that the insurgents spend about $100 to kill one of our boys. Their costs are so artificially low because the insurgents use captured U.S. military hardware, and arms that have been diverted from supplies given to the Iraqi army, and residue from pre-invasion stockpiles, and, of course, munitions supplied by Iran. They fight their side of the war in the same way that the “good guys” in Star Wars fight The Evil Empire. This is what’s meant by 4th generation warfare. 9/11 was another example of this. By way of comparison, we spend about 50 million dollars to kill one of them (the trillion-dollar cost of the war divided by the 20,000 that we’ve killed so far).

All of this takes us back to the idea that America is on the wrong track. It’s not that we can’t afford our huge military expenditures. We actually spend a lower percentage of GDP on defense now than we did in the late 1950s. It’s wasted money, but we can still afford the cost. What we can’t afford is the global perception that we, as a country, are just big and stupid. To use an analogy from the school environment, the rest of the world is hitting the books and excelling at extra-curricular activities, and The United States is bulked up on steroids and focused only on the Friday night game.