To My Not Really Right Wing Mom in response to the Forwarded Email "Wall Street Journal Sizes Up Obama - WOW"

This is a general look at an especially dishonest anonymous forwarded email circulated back in mid-2010. "My Not Really Right Wing Mom" deliberately echoes "My Right Wing Dad" which is a great source for right wing (anonymously forwarded) emails in general.  It uses techniques found in many shady emails to make it  look like it came from a highly respected source, in this case, the Wall Street Journal.  Other emails have falsely "quoted" notable people like Lee Iacocca, Bill Cosby, and even Charles Krauthammer -- usually highly modified versions of something they really did say.  In the Iacocca (ex Chrysler CEO), a scathing critique of George W. Bush was modified by taking out all Bush references (from an excerpt of his 2007 book Where Have All the Leaders Gone?), and adding in one small implied reference to Obama -- just enough, and passed it off as Iacocca's warning to the nation about Obama.

So much for the trick of calling something a WSJ article when it wasn't.  The next posting: Detailed responses to Fake "Wall Street Journal Article" tackles its nonsense point by point.

Where are we headed?

I am deeply deeply depressed about where we seem to be headed as a country, and particularly the dismal level of debate.

I've tried to be jaunty and witty. For some reason it seemed like the thing to do. "Eisenhower Socialist" is a bit of nonsense I made up as sort of a protest against everybody to the left of Milton Friedman (or Rush Limbaugh) being called a socialist or better yet Marxist.

Has Obama seemed to have a problem with the phrase "War on Terror"? Well, I have a problem with it. If apocalyptic minded Islamic fundamentalists are scattered throughout the world, then the history of warfare doesn't give us much insight about what to do about them, or maybe it gives us very misguided insight: pick an enemy country and start bombing them. Where did 9/11 come from? From a failed state where warlords prevailed, and the official Talaban government was very compatible with Osama Bin Laden's bloodlust and desire to have a world dominated by a new Islamic caliphate (the good news for us is they have to conquer or convert the Sunni Muslim powers as well as the secular and/or Christian West, Hindu India, officially atheistic China, and so on and so on).

Anyway, the terrorist cells were spread around the globe in many different countries, and there was a mood of many countries wanting to participate in rooting it out that mostly went away when the "War on Terror" was used as an excuse to have a "regular" war with Iraq, which was mostly irrelevant to Al Qaeda style terrorism except that we turned Iraq into a new breeding and training ground for terrorists while failing to follow through on transforming Afghanistan so it would never serve that purpose again.

Basically, Bush's war on terror has left Afghanistan in a state where if we walked away today it might just welcome in a new Osama Bin Laden or start growing one of their own.

A Radical Center Manifesto (or A Quick and DIrty attempt at one)

The legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. But in all that people can individually do as well for themselves, Government ought not to interfere. Abraham Lincoln

This is a very very incomplete "manifesto".

Most violent revolutions are unmitigated disasters. They mostly don't occur unless people are in a desparate state, but the provide too much of an opportunity for very bad power hungry leaders to climb to power, often over mountains of dead bodies. Something like what has been called a "velvet revolution" can have lead to a sane well-governed nation, but what does it take to make something like that happen? A subject to discuss some other time.

"Economic shock therapy" also tends to have terrible results, as far as I can see. When people think they have to dismantle a more or less working statist economy overnight, the results will probably catastrophic to people's well being; it is apt to create an ultra-rich class of people who are not good at running the enterprises they suddenly own, and as with Russia, it may reverse progress in the areas of democracy and freedom.

While I believe in mixed economies, socialism is at best a very dangerous experiment as it involved giving ultimate power to some central apparatus and just saying its purpose it to serve the people won't make it so. Extremely concentrated power is an invitation to the Stalins and Maos of the world.

If private enterprises become bigger and more powerful than the state, they are very likely to in effect become the state.

I favor "right sized" government, which is somewhere between a government you can "drown in a bathtub", and a government with sufficent power to arbatrarily seize and distribute property en masse. You cannot have socialism without a government that is just too powerful. People with extreme views are spared the embarrassment of being asked questions like "What do you mean by too powerful?" which don't have all-purpose answers, but that is not nearly enough reason, in my opinion for me to join their ranks.

Sometimes, and maybe very often, government needs to have a lot of fat cut out but this could better be accomplished by a lot of people seriously getting involved with the specifics, taking seriously what government needs to accomplish, and yes, sometimes asking is it time for govenment to be taking this job on at all?

Sometimes, government needs to grow, or even take on new things.

• E.g. if you are fighting a war, you probably should be expanding the army, not hiring $1000/day contractors, and bleeding the reserves. If you're afraid of asking for money to expand military forces, you probably shouldn't be taking on that particular war.
• Evolving technologies are apt to have an affect on what government should and shouldn't be doing.
• E.g., in the first half of the 19th century, when some of the "founding fathers" were still guiding the government, the post office subsidized newspapers in the interest of having a better informed public. According to one source, they made up 95% of the weight of mail transported for 15% of the revenue. Most newspapers were one-man operations, and in place of a national reporting staff, they exchanged newspapers with printers in other parts of the country. Much of this exchange was carried free. Do you think that might have required some non-obvious interpreting of the constitution? But without the network of information provider/propagandists that that interpretation brought into being, voters in this country, where it took week for some congressment to get to Washington, would surely have been less well informed - perhaps fatally so (for the country).
  
• In the 1960s and later, the interstate highway system was built, and the speed of automobile travel was more than doubled. Also, many private turnpike operations were put out of business.
• The Internet was a product of DARPA (Research arm of the Defense Department), and various (mostly public) university computer programmers. The private sector gave us AOL and MSN.
• The highly regulated monopoly, AT&T was until sometime in the 70s or 80s, the only reasonable way of providing national telecommunications. Its size, and perhaps its not being driven by quarterly profits enabled it to keep up a massive research lab which developed the transister and the laser. Other electronics and telecommunication companies got most of their early business from aerospace, a largely government driven enterprise.

If we maintain that government should only provide national defense, and protection of some people from others -- all through threat and use of force, the government will tend to solve problems through the threat and use of force regardless of whether they could be better addressed through other means. This was well addressed in the international sphere in The Ugly American, which was written not by "bleeding heart liberals" but by down in the trenches cold warriors, and addressed how we were losing Southeast Asia to Communism in the 1950s. E.g. in a "Factual Epilogue",

The Communists are not so restricted in their approach. In Yunan Province, China, they have a vast schooling system for students from Southeast Asia. The students, roughly 30,000 strong, come from Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and the fringe areas of Vietnam. The term is eighteen months, and lectures are delivered in the native language of the student. Courses include agriculture, tanning, printing, blacksmithing, and other crafts which country people from small towns need. The students live in dormitories with their fellow countryment, and religious guidance is provided by clergymen of their own faith".

Power is Power is Power

The Bolsheviks established a government with power sufficient to appropriate any and all property. Somehow they didn't give much though to just how a government that powerful would be kept in check. The vast majority of prominent Bolsheviks, if they lived into the 1930s, were eventually rounded up and murdered by their creation. What were they thinking? Activists have a tendency to believe that the kind of power they envision and identify with will remain "good". Desperation can breed sloppy thinking. The Russia of 1917 was a terrible place; things were in flux; now was the chance to change it ...

Fast forward to the 1990s. Russia seemed for the moment to be headed towards Democracy, but to a group of radical free marketeers who were somehow charged with transforming the economy, it seemed desperately important to get the "means of production" back into private hands. Apparently which private hands didn't seem to matter. Everything was in flux; the moment could be lost if not seized now. And so vast enterprizes came to be privately owned by ex party hacks and a few "wild west" style entrepreneurs. Newly billionaires got total control over the media, and elections were highjacked, and Russia reversed course, away from democracy and free speech. Enormous piles of money in the midst of a population that had lost all its savings, and was lucky if they received any wage at all, could buy just about anything.

Businesses big enough to buy and sell small or poor countries can rival the most misguided states when it comes to destroying freedom and democracy. Look at Russia, and look at the history of Latin America. The U.S.'s Founding Fathers set up a system of competition between branches of government to make it less likely to devolve into absolutism, but government is our only tool for disciplining the potential tyranny of wealth. When too much power is taken away from government, as with Weimar, and the Russia of the 1990s, it invites takeover by some other power, which then becomes, in effect the government. The next step after a government small enough to "drown in a bathtub" is typically not pretty. For Russia as a case in point, see Sale of the Century by Chrystia Freeland.

Email from a Friend of a Friend: From Urban Legends to Political Smears

Going back for years, anonymous forwarded emails have been a source of urban legends, jokes, and other frivolous but sometimes entertaining stuff.

Now they facilitate the equivalent of old fashioned whispering campaigns, but vastly more powerful, and while that sort of thing mostly happenned on a state level or smaller (it being hard to do it on a difficult scale and not get caught). E.g. the rumor that Ann Richardson was a lesbian in the Texas governor's race, and the one spread in just one state in the 2000 republican primary campaign that McCain had an out of wedlock black child.

But email knows no boundaries. A couple of years ago, I started getting forwarded emails from my Mom, with claims that could generally be shot down easily with 15 minutes of internet research. They seemed to be really affecting my parents' views, and based on what they told me, they were generally believed by most of their friends. But they were quite simply full of provable lies. They would show signs of having been forwarded a half dozen or so times, with visible 'CC' lists giving them a sort of homey look. You receive this sort of thing from a friend who forwarded, and are apt to assume it was written by a friend of that friend, or a friend of a friend of a friend, not that they are being churned out by some sort of under the radar political operator, but that is what I think they are, based partly on consistency of style.

Here are a couple of references:

The New Right-Wing Smear Machine by Christopher Hayes Oct 25, 2007

MyRightWingDad.net: FW: OBAMA DEATH LIST

If the same sort of phenomenon is going on with Liberal or Ultra Liberal sources, I would be very interested to investigate that as well.

Technology, Warfare, and the Fleetingness of Technological Advantages

Technology can change balances of power in large and unpredictable ways. It may favor defense in one period, and attack in another. Machine guns and barbed wire seemed to favor mutual attrition in WWI, and minimize the effectiveness of strategy and calculated movement -- at least until toward the end, the first crude tanks were deployed.

Nuclear weapons led to decades of huge military build-ups and relatively small proxy wars, and a dangerous dependence on spreading sophisticated arms and military training among unstable, irrational and undemocratic allies, and especially towards the end of the Cold War, building up the capabilities, organizational ability, and confidence of extreme groups like the Wahabis and Muslim Brotherhood.

It is hard to remember the few short years when the atom bomb seemed to give America an unanswerable advantage.

The use of drone aircraft, esp. in Pakistan and Afghanistan may help accomplish the seemingly impossible task of flushing Al Queda out of wild mountainous areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but at the risk of outraging much public opinion in Pakistan and possibly helping destabilize Pakistan with its large nuclear arsenal. The advantage could also be short lived. With advancing technology, a new kind of cheap off-the-shelf drone may some day be widespread, wiping out this U.S. advantage.

Drones, "smart bombs", and all the high technology warfare that the U.S. alone has mastery of at the moment are dependent on some very fragile infrastructure and a peculiar state of international affairs. For a long while, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had a mutual reluctance to militarize space, with the exception of spying and the extreme case of ICBMs. I.e. we did not shoot down eachother's satellites. If one did, the other would, and the world was safer if we both had spy satellites than if neither did. For the last 2 decades inertia has ruled in this area, except that the U.S., with its new use of aerospace enhanced "conventional" weapons is "playing a dangerous game", giving other nations the motive to shoot down our satellites. China is probably the only nation likely to do this, having the technological strength (and wealth), and the possibilities for vast hidden military power (I think China must be the least monitored and monitorable great power having still great hinterlands that can be hidden from foreigners and from the vast majority of Chinese). This, combined with the sheer manpower of China, could facilitate enormous secret projects. These might involve the training of huge numbers of soldiers in foreign languages and whatever else it might take to quickly seize and hold an area, say, of the middle East. Or they might involve developing and assembling some new technology of warfare, such as a communication network consisting of a vast swarm of solar powered unmanned planes distributed high in the atmosphere, and simply too numerous to take down with any technology other than a very similar but superior swarm of robotic flying machines (while satellites remain extemely vulnerable -- I can only imagine such a system deployed after the U.S. satellite communication system was destroyed. It would be enormously hostile and provocative but an extremely effective shift in the balance of power). As long as China does not become an open democratic society, such things are at least remotely possible. On the other hand, a rich and comfortable ruling class will at most times prefer the status quo to the unpredictable consequences of such a move, which probably gives us time to try to resume making the world more open and democratic.

"Climate Change" and Energy Policy

Until recently, those who call "global warming" a hoax or misguided crusade have not bothered to dispute the actual rising of CO2 levels. It is just too well established in multiple ways, including bubbles of actual air from periods going back tens of thousands of years, trapped in the Antarctic ice.

The recent attempt to convince people that there has been no rise in the CO2 level (based on misrepresentation of one climatologist's words -- try googling "wolfgang knorr climate change") is apparently so meritless that neither Rush Limbaugh nor Glenn Beck will touch it, so it has been left to somewhat lower profile blogs like hotair.com, Lucianne.com, and BigGovernment.com.

The increase (by close to 50% in the last 100 years) of CO2 does not prove global warming, and there are various complicated arguments that accept the increase of CO2 but still say there's no global warming problem. For my part, basically I accept that the vast majority of relevant scientists agree it is happenning and is due to fossil fuel burning and deforestation. How rapidly it is happenning is controversial, but there are signs that the consequences, esp. melting of ice sheets could speed up in unexpected ways.

The projections have to be based on some baseline estimates of the amount of gas, oil, and coal that will be extracted and consumed. If there is a revolution in extraction -- whether from offshore drilling, "cracking" technologies for natural gas or simply discovery of vast new oil fields -- resulting in hydrocarbon fuel use greatly exceding current projections then the projections of greenhouse gas increase will also have to be revised upward. We have observed overall temperatures rising decade by decade, and have recently been surprised at how much difference one more degree of average temperature seems to make -- esp in the melting of ice sheets (the melting of ice that currently rests on land, as in Greenland and Antarctica is what would raise sea levels. The melting of floating ice, such as at North Pole will NOT have such an effect). At the very least we are changing something that we cannot reverse, and do not understand very well.

"Global warning" however is far from the only reason to try to burn less fuel, and develop greater fuel efficiency and more renewable energy. The less carbon based fuels are in demand, the less of our real wealth will go to extracting them. Without some downward pressures on demand, with contries like China finally becoming technological powerhouse (their population is comparable to that of the whole industrialized world), we are pretty sure to see $4/gallon gas again, and it could well greatly excede this. The fact that so much of the source of world wealth is in Russia, the middle east, Latin America, etc. has partly reversed a long trend of ill educated and undemocratic nations having no leverage over the educated, democratic and stable nations.

(Partial change of subject to economics in general):
A great deal of the danger and instability of the world today (and at other times in history) is due to such a powerful resource being in corrupt and often irrational hands. The potential for renewable energy will be much more evenly distributed among nations, and will almost certainly be extremely beneficial to one of the poorest parts of the world, and maybe the next great manufactury of terrorists if people are not given better things to pursue -- Africa. It will tend to make these countries self-sufficient, without however, providing a concentrated faucet of wealth prone to be monopolized by a few people in power (this is an idea becoming clear(er) in my mind for the first time. What might be called a "faucet effect" may go a long way to explaining the conditions of the old American South (cotton and slavery), Central America (banannas, and heritage of slavery), South America (among other things, oil, copper and other ores, and the heritage of slavery), the middle east (oil), Southern Africa (gold and diamonds). All of these products -- natural resources and mono-cultures) seem to be managed most efficiently between a powerful few in one country and a powerful few in another country (I wrote about slavery as a "skimmable" river of wealth in paper for History of Ideas class).