Thursday, October 01, 2009
21 Guns and the Graveyard of Empires
I don't know if any of my readers watched the VMAs, or if they did if they took anything away except Kanye-is-an-asshole.
But Greenday's 21 Guns won the song of the year.
I think this is pretty significant, that a radical anti-war tune won big.
The Berkeley Repertory theater has made a "juke-box musical" out of the last Greenday album, American Idiot... and its breaking all box office records.
Culture Monster (props, buzzkill)
The GOP is pretty tone deaf to contemporary culture as proven by cluelessly naming their "grassroots" protest movement after a sex act.
But I think this parallels the emergent youth protest against the Viet Nam War in the sixties.
Now, I wasn't around....but wasn't there a lot of anti-war protest music?
I think Obama is going to decline to send more troops to the Graveyard of Empires.
// posted by Matoko Kusanagi @ 7:17 AM 
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The antiwar movement today is nowhere near the size of the anti-Vietnam war movement. The reason is because of the draft.
An all-volunteer army changes everything.
Perhaps if USA hadn't got distracted into Iraq, more could have been done about Afghanistan.
Now, I read Gen. McChrystal’s plea for more troops to head off a loss, and I think: OK. I understand loss. If you get wiped out and totally lose control. You are forced to withdraw. Think France in Vietnam after Dien Bien Phu.
But WTF defines victory? Say you won the war in Afghanistan. How would you even know? Does anyone actually know what the goal is? NATO are there because we don't want to lose....riiiight.
FWIW it is strongly rumored that European NATO will shortly pull the plug. After that USA is on its own.
Commentary in AsiaTimes about a recent article in China Daily.
If it was up to me, I'd rapidly phase out Iraq. I'd keep Afghanistan going for a while in the hope of stabilizing the situation in AfPak. Once Pakistan looked stable, I'd pull out of Afghanistan too.
Then, I'd put a huge effort into military robotics. Nanobots, whatever. So the next counterinsurgency can be fought with hunterkiller droids.
Number one priority for me right now is get the Western economy back on its feet. ASAP.
An all-volunteer army changes everything.
Perhaps if USA hadn't got distracted into Iraq, more could have been done about Afghanistan.
Now, I read Gen. McChrystal’s plea for more troops to head off a loss, and I think: OK. I understand loss. If you get wiped out and totally lose control. You are forced to withdraw. Think France in Vietnam after Dien Bien Phu.
But WTF defines victory? Say you won the war in Afghanistan. How would you even know? Does anyone actually know what the goal is? NATO are there because we don't want to lose....riiiight.
FWIW it is strongly rumored that European NATO will shortly pull the plug. After that USA is on its own.
Commentary in AsiaTimes about a recent article in China Daily.
If it was up to me, I'd rapidly phase out Iraq. I'd keep Afghanistan going for a while in the hope of stabilizing the situation in AfPak. Once Pakistan looked stable, I'd pull out of Afghanistan too.
Then, I'd put a huge effort into military robotics. Nanobots, whatever. So the next counterinsurgency can be fought with hunterkiller droids.
Number one priority for me right now is get the Western economy back on its feet. ASAP.
OT
1. New study says consciousness is the brain's WiFi network.
2. NVidia's new Fermi Chip. 512 GPUs on a chip. 3 Billion transistors. Suitable for graphics and a lot of other parallel processing tasks.
1. New study says consciousness is the brain's WiFi network.
2. NVidia's new Fermi Chip. 512 GPUs on a chip. 3 Billion transistors. Suitable for graphics and a lot of other parallel processing tasks.
US broad money, MZM continues to contract since June (Advanced Release, PDF file). Annualized rate is -3.4%pa by loglinear least squares regression.
I am not the only one to worry about this. (M3 is a closely-related concept to MZM). Ambrose sees it too.
I dunno. I just hope the BIS and other Central Banks are paying attention, in case it doesn't reverse by itself. Although it still could. The YoY annual rate is not so bad yet. It's dropped from over 10% midyear to around 8% at the latest release.
I am not the only one to worry about this. (M3 is a closely-related concept to MZM). Ambrose sees it too.
I dunno. I just hope the BIS and other Central Banks are paying attention, in case it doesn't reverse by itself. Although it still could. The YoY annual rate is not so bad yet. It's dropped from over 10% midyear to around 8% at the latest release.
I noticed that Washington's Blog has a large item relating to breaking up the Too Big To Fail banks.
I strongly agree with this policy.
If they're too big to fail, they're just too big.
No financial institution should be allowed to get so large that it threatens the security of the state, much less the global financial system.
I strongly agree with this policy.
If they're too big to fail, they're just too big.
No financial institution should be allowed to get so large that it threatens the security of the state, much less the global financial system.
The GOP is pretty tone deaf to contemporary culture as proven by cluelessly naming their "grassroots" protest movement after a sex act.
I thought the Other Side did that.
We wingnuts might go along with it in order to show we're not intimidated by something so mind-bogglingly irrelevant.
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I thought the Other Side did that.
We wingnuts might go along with it in order to show we're not intimidated by something so mind-bogglingly irrelevant.
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