All of us often make the mistake that very smart people have good judgement too. Read "The Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstam. Very smart people also work for our CIA, NSA, and State Department. Think about how many mistakes they have made in the last quarter century!
History also teaches us that no matter how mighty, guerilla warfare is extremely difficult to overcome, especially since our behavioral norms, do not permit killing whole populations to kill a few. Small bands of guerillas throughout history do not defeat large armies, but they persist until the large armies retreat. That is why I disagree with the Afghan war continuing. The best we can do is to not permit them to spread. Give Northeast Pakistan to the Pashtun tribes there! That is what Pakistan did but we circumvented the wishes of Pakistan and spread the guerilla wars.
In about 1995, Al Gore, who has 15 more IQ points than J. F. Kennedy, convene a conference to protect us from terrorism. They then concluded that since we cannot fight them easily since they have access to powerful weapons helped greatly by "loans," drug money, and corruption. Improvised Explosive Devices IED are killing Americans every day, much more than bullets.
The top arms dealers are the United States, Israel, China and Europe. Banks are also involved because debt payments give them great incentive to loan money to terrorists in Africa and places around the world. A good movie, The International, two stars, starring Clive Owen on STRZ repeats Sunday morning Jan 3 and late afternoon in Oregon and probably later in the week shows how banks may even resort to murder to increase profits. Arms sales from China
The Romans, Normans, The Low Land Scots or more correctly Scots-Irish along with other tribes held off the Roman Army and the English for a thousand years! In books such as How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It by Arthur Herman (Paperback - Sep 24, 2002) and Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by James Webb (Paperback - Oct 11, 2005), we discover that a lot of modern American success and political bent as trumpeted by the Republican Party came from these people. In fact extended wars of greed and religion have shaped much of human history.
But not usually mentioned in many commentaries, is that the ones who actually transformed Scotland into the modern world were Irish invaders of northern Scotland mentioned in passing by James Webb in his book. Much of The Scots-Irish in Belfast were from Southwest Scotland, the territory often used by invaders.
Webb, a former marine, does mention that the Scots-Irish permeate our military as well as the Catholic Irish. In the same ways minorities have transformed the world's progress such as the ancient Sumerians did in Iraq and possibly Southern India, Jews our scientific, arts and financial systems, and increasingly women, East Asians, and South Asians has made a considerable impact on our scientific knowledge and progress.
Based on this history, I am inclined to conclude that our trend of developing into a feudal system of the wealthy and elites getting most of the fruits of our labor, our best schools, training, and opportunities, our country will likely decay into oblivion in the 21st Century. Why do I think that we made incredible progress after World War II? The GI Bill allowed many more to go to college from all classes and our elementary and high schools got enough money to get the best teachers, many of them women. California had the best educational system in the 1970s in the USA, but Proposition 13 and Reagan's tax cuts for the rich and corporations and budget cuts in education, allowing a high influx of Illegal immigrants into California, an act benefiting corporations greatly with cheap labor and as President making them citizens lowered the wages of working Americans severely.
But the Reagan Revolution destroyed equal opportunity which made me especially fearful that the rich and the elites who support them will use our army and police to protect their wealth and make running for the Congress, the Senate, and the President into a run of candidates for the status quo to maintain their power. His legacy and the Republican Party will be looked on by historians in a manner which history has been recorded. The winners write history and controls our future.
Even Some Conservatives are Worried About Income Inequality Between the Rich and 90% of Americans
By Chrystia Freeland, US Managing Editor and Often on MSNBC's Morning Meeting http://dylan.msnbc.com
Freeland The Financial Times (Jan 2, 2010)
Jim Manzi, Manhattan Institute, ... "If we let inequality and its underlying causes grow unchecked, we will allow out the middle class threatening social cohesion and eventually surrendering our international position." ...
He fears that the current system of income inequality has created a severe social and cultural gap between the highly educated elites and everyone else. What Manzi and Freeland do not mention is the financial power of corporate elites and the wealthy is used to gain use of our tax dollars to enrich themselves! Former reporter David Cay Johnston, writes about his in his book "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)" Steven Greenhouse who is probably a former New York Times reporter wrote The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Workers explained in the titles of some of his chapters: Worked Over and Overworked, Workplace Hell, Downright Dickensian, The Not-So-Golden Years, And The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren of Harvard (Current Oversight of TARP Funds) and Amelia Warren Tyagi, her daughter James K. Galbraith in The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too In Part II The Simple Economics of Predator and Prey
In chapter 7 "What the Rise of Inequality is Really About" Surveys indicate that the Danish people are the happiest in the world. Republicans tend to call them Socialists, but the Danish approach has a low degree of inequality which maintains the human need for a hierarchical system which has been found to be reconciled with an efficient, advanced, and wealthy system. In our current system most workers really hate their jobs, but rarely express it in surveys.
That is why Americans spend so much time in distractions, often at the job if they have a computer. Wal-Mart tries to control their workers by not allowing them to speak to each other unless monitored and even once had a policy of locking night workers so they could not leave even during medical emergencies. Monitoring of employees is more the rule than an exception. Now corporations are trying to monitor texting by employees from their cell phones during work and possibly secretly all the time. It is up for review by the Conservative Majority Supreme Court! Almost all corporate rulings helping corporations have been affirmative. The coercion
In contrast, chapter ten, The Rise of the Predator State discusses the corporate takeover of government under the second Bush Administration. That is why I often mention the fact that so many things were done by many former CEOs (dictator run government) with only corporate profits a concern that so far only a small part of what the Bush Gang screwed us will be found even in the next eight years.
Current history is also controlled by the elite via propaganda often seen on television by advertising and what they shows they allow to be shown. Of course, it would be too obvious if only one point of view by so-called supporting "facts", but propaganda is always a mix of truth, but propaganda is usually the most emphasized as we see in the front page of most major newspapers in the Headlines and First Few Paragraphs to Frame and Issue. Some Headlines could be deceptive as the one put on after the recount of the 2000 election Recount in Florida. The Times had in very large type on the Florida election that Bush Would Have Won Anyway.
After my reading the jump pages I found that the truthful headline should have been Gore Won in Any Version of the Recount! Gore was 5 percent ahead according to exit polls. Gore would have won by many more votes if Governor Jeb Bush, GW Bush's brother, did not remove 100,000 Democrats from voting by deleting them from their registration using false felons allegations. This was admitted by the Computer company that removed the votes, but GW Bush did nothing!
Also the Supreme Court violated the Tenth Amendment and Florida State Voting Laws by trumping the Florida Supreme Court.
There is still time, but all of us must pay attention and act. Kick out the radical Republican Party and maintain strong pressure on the Democrats to do what is best for most of us and our country. Now very few members of one class advance to another, but many have dropped down one or two class levels in our society. Only two percent of the bottom 25% finish college although the current grading system is a joke.
With the advance in weapons and money, it would be very difficult to have another French Revolution, but terrorism against the elites and wealthy is likely. The History Channel's "French Revolution" documentary has been well received by critics.
Jim Kawakami, Jan 2, 2010, Blogging at http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
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