What am I missing here?

Boortz...
THE U.S.EXAMPLE

Barack Obama finally came around on Russia, scolding the nation for invading a sovereign nation (Georgia). However, now he has thrown a new caveat into the mix: the United States should set a better example on that front, too. He says, "We've got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies ... They can't charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point."

So finally, Barack Obama comes out and directly compares Russia's military invasion of Georgia to our own efforts in Iraq. Way to go Big O.

Does anyone remember Georgia being a threat to Russia? Did Georgia have a weapons program? Was Georgia in violation of multiple UN Resolutions ... violations that authorized any UN member to go in and remove their leader? Just wondering.

What am I missing?

Does anyone remember Iraq being a threat to the their neighbors let alone the United States? Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction?--and weren't the U.N. weapons inspectors, as well as many allies, and anti-war activists here at home pointing to the holes in that idea? Wasn't the US in violation of UN Resolutions when it preemptively attacked with no authorization from the Security Council?--the answer is yes if you weren't aware.

The lack of awareness about the facts during the war... and the rewriting of history afterwards has been an amazing and shockingly successful feat by conservatives.

And if you were wondering how laughable the idea that Iraq was a threat... think back to Iraq I. Where Arab countries were calling for us to beat back the preemptive attack by Iraq which lacked authorization from the security council. Thats why we fought with a HUGE coalition, and the war was paid for--mostly by Saudi Arabia if my memory serves me.

Agree or disagree with how it went down... we--Republican and Democrat alike--knew how to win wars, effectively, and at as little cost to our soldiers and our citizens wallets. Republicans were taken over by the conservative wing and all of a sudden the ability to win a war becomes this great quandary. As if military strategy was back to the rock, bigger rock, spear, club... of our ancestors days in the caves.

sigh... what a waste of lives, money, and our national security...

Obama 2008. The lesser of two evils...

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

How far the Republicans have strayed

One of my topics of interest/talking points is how far the Republican Party has strayed from what made it respectable. I might not have always agreed but I could concede some legitimacy. With the conservative take-over of the Republican Party... that respect is gone and quite frankly no longer deserving.

Bob Herbert today with another example of why McCain--and in far too many cases Obama as well--is talking the talk... but not the walk...

August 19, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
A World of Difference
By BOB HERBERT

Presidential elections always have their share of foolishness, hypocrisy and, let's say, elasticity when it comes to facts.

This is what comes to mind whenever I hear John McCain and other Republicans reverentially invoking the name of Theodore Roosevelt. Senator McCain will tell you outright: "I am a Teddy Roosevelt Republican."

That's about as elastic as the facts can get. In June, Mr. McCain ("We're gonna drill here! We're gonna drill now!") got a big boost in donations from oil industry executives after he reversed course and came out strongly in favor of offshore drilling. A Washington Post headline pointedly said: "Industry Gushed Money After Reversal on Drilling."

To put it mildly, that was not very Rooseveltian. Around the same time that the McCain campaign was pocketing its oil industry windfall, the historian Douglas Brinkley was poring over letters in which Roosevelt, running for his first full term as president in 1904, was indignantly ordering his campaign to return a $100,000 contribution from the Standard Oil Company.

In a letter to his campaign manager, dated Oct. 26, 1904, Roosevelt said: "I must ask you to direct that the money be returned to them forthwith." As Roosevelt saw it: "We cannot under any circumstances afford to take a contribution which can be even improperly construed as putting us under an improper obligation."

That kind of thinking is long gone, from both parties. Barack Obama, as well as Senator McCain, has taken contributions from oil industry executives. But what is telling about this particular difference between Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain is that it is so illustrative of what Roosevelt was really about, and how fundamentally different that was from what Senator McCain and the latter-day Republican Party is about.

"The truth of the matter is that Roosevelt today would be on the left," said Mr. Brinkley, who is writing a biography of the former president titled "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt's and the Crusade for America."
Roosevelt believed passionately in regulating industry and curbing the excesses of the great corporations. He favored the imposition of an inheritance tax and fought his party's increasing tendency to cater to the very wealthy. And, of course, he was a ferocious protector of the environment.

Roosevelt was known as the "trust-buster," but it was in the area of environmental conservation that he really made his mark. Mr. Brinkley, in a draft preface to the biography, tells how a number of bird species in the U.S. were headed for extinction as the 20th century approached, in large part because of the popularity of feathered hats for women.

By 1886, when the Audubon Society was founded, more than five million birds a year were being slaughtered to satisfy the millinery trade. The feather boom was especially big in Florida. Egrets, herons — just piles and piles of birds were being destroyed, many of them by men with semiautomatic weapons.

Roosevelt was outraged that what he termed "the despoilers" were threatening to ruin the bird populations along the Florida coasts. Having already championed the preservation of what became Yellowstone National Park, Roosevelt designated Pelican Island, which had a once-thriving bird population off the east central coast of Florida, as the nation's first federal bird reservation.

The move was a tremendous success. Pelican Island became the first unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "By 2003," Mr. Brinkley wrote, "when Pelican Island celebrated its centennial, the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System comprised over 540 wildlife refuges on more than 95 million acres."

We're now in a ridiculous period in which politicians are concerned about appearing too well-spoken and too intellectual — elitist — as if mangling the language while downing a shot and slurping from a mug of beer were sure signs of fitness for high office. So it might come as a surprise to some that Senator McCain's macho hero happened to have been among the first naturalists at Harvard, an inveterate bird-watcher, and a prolific and sensitive writer.

According to Mr. Brinkley: "When writing or lecturing about American birds, Roosevelt often turned downright lyrical, sometimes achieving the level of song."
The kicker to the story about the contribution from Standard Oil is that despite Roosevelt's repeated orders, it may not have been returned. Roosevelt went to his grave believing that it had been, but Mr. Brinkley said a later investigation of the campaign's finances left open the possibility that Roosevelt's orders may not have been followed.

Roosevelt was a complicated fellow. Progressive in much of his politics and intensely concerned about the long-term welfare of the country and its people, he was also a social Darwinian and a conflict-loving imperialist.
What is not in question is that he was a far, far cry from John McCain and today's G.O.P.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Fall of the Roman Republic

I've been pulling together some thoughts for my political theory class...that is an expansion of my question/contention that the Republic as it currently stands is gone... with the Bush era we are purely under the facade of Democracy... might the Republic return? Might it be gone for good? I lean towards the first but that might be idealistic nievity... and might not idealistic nievity be a requirement of all republicans?

Anyhow I had to look into the history of the fall of the Roman Republic and came across something I wanted to share/keep...

Fall of the Roman Republic

In this chapter, the lives and impact of Caesar, Octavian, Antonius (Antony) and even Cleopatra, along with the continuing stories of men like Pompey, Crassus and Cicero will be examined. The Fall of the Republic was more than a single man or event. It was a culmination of several individual actions or achievements, coupled with social conditions that weighed heavily on Roman society. Additionally, massive and rapid expansion from Rome's foundation as a fledgling city 700 years earlier until the mid 1st century BC, created monumental holes in the political and governing ability of the Senate. Periods of stability were mixed in with those of near collapse while powerful generals or inciters of the Roman mob jockeyed for position.

Beginning with the Punic Wars and Roman conquest outside of Italy, followed by massive importation of slaves, the face of Roman life was changing far more rapidly than the governing body could deal with. Political infighting was and always would be a common trait in any system, but even the greatest of Romans like Scipio Africanus, fell victim to the whims of politicians. The social instability that resulted from inequities in the class system gave way to rise of demagogues like the brothers Gracchi. The use of the citizen assemblies for popular agendas tore at the very fabric of Senatorial power.

Men like Marius and Sulla, with their own personal agendas and rivalries wreaked havoc in an already weakened structure. Partisan politics of the conservative Optimate Senators trying to keep power with the elite class, while the tactics of the Populares, who looked to the lower classes for support, divided the people and classes into what seemed like warring factions. For nearly 100 years, the climate was unpredictable at best, and brutally bloody at worst.

By the time of the rise of Gaius Julius Caesar, the stage was set for a single man to assume power and stabilize the Empire. Caesar was neither the only man responsible for the fall, nor the one man who could stop it, but his role in the final demise is undeniable. He neither started the fall nor finished it, but continued a cycle of events that made its collapse irreversible. Contemporaries of the brilliant general and politician hold as much blame as the great man himself, however. How different events may have been without the plays for power and a bit of humility among the Senate.

Regardless, despite Caesar's short reign and policies of reform and stability, the strength of his character and personality held the Republic together only as long as he lived. His assassination and the continuing Civil Wars that resulted, would be required to bring necessary power to a single ruler of a single great nation: The Roman Empire. The eventual rise and adoption of Caesar's heir, Octavian, to the exalted post of Augustus spelled the real end of the Republic. He, unlike his predecessors, rose at a time when the will for the Republican system had nearly died.

While tradition and some semblance of power would remain, the foundation of government under a single figure was a requirement to continue the advancement of the Empire. It was Augustus who proved to be the one man great and powerful enough to control the Senate, the mob and the Legions. Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus rose above all the great Romans before him to outlast political opponents, reform a corrupt government and stabilize a system in disarray. The Fall of the Republic was inevitable, but fortunately for Rome, the right man at the right time was there to step in as the first Roman Emperor.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

online introduction

Introduction to A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

The Distant Horizon

By Paul Kennedy
From Foreign Affairs , May/June 2008

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A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World . William J. Bernstein . Atlantic Monthly , 2008 , 384 30

Summary: William Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange, Strobe Talbott's The Great Experiment, and Amy Chua's Day of Empire take up the challenge of 'Big History' -- and in the process shed light on the real choices policymakers face.

Maybe one day I can do the big history on something...

Twenty years ago, the distinguished economic historian David Landes wrote an article in The New Republic about what he called "Big History." It was a review of William McNeill's extraordinary The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 and of my own more modest work The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. By the term "Big History," he did not have in mind such multivolume works as Arnold Toynbee's 12-volume A Study of History, or Samuel Morison's 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, or Joseph Needham's impossible to count how many volumes of Science and Civilisation in China. Nor did Landes mean to imply by the use of "big" that this mode of inquiry was superior to that of the history-from-below school that had emerged, spectacularly, in the 1960s. He had no quarrel with accounts of life in Provençal villages, of northern Italian millers, or of trade unionists in Lancashire. He was simply calling readers' attention to a different category or, if you like, a different level of historical writing.

What Landes had in mind were single-volume books whose authors took hold of a vast topic and then wrestled it to the ground, comprehended it, and explained it to readers -- in sum, gave it historical sense. This creative intellectual grappling with big themes described, of course, Landes' own pedagogic journey, a career in which the subjects attempted became bolder and grander: from Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt to The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe From 1750 to the Present and The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor.

Landes' is a hard act to follow, and most of us historians have been happy to sail, at some distance, in his wake. Three recent books, however, have taken up the challenge of Big History: William Bernstein's A Splendid Exchange, Strobe Talbott's The Great Experiment, and Amy Chua's Day of Empire. All are significant contributions, and one, Chua's, has a chance of becoming a classic. They are ambitious, heavily supported by wide reading and many notes, and willing to take intellectual risks. None resembles anything like a history textbook, and all are better read -- better appreciated and better criticized -- by someone with a good background in world history. Still, that should not deter general readers interested in humankind's larger story. Indeed, such readers should be intrigued by these very different attempts to make sense of the broad sweep of history.

In an age of sound bites and the awful daily vision of human beings chattering into their cell phones as they hustle down the street, it is deeply satisfying that a small number of people still take the time to ponder and make connections between events over centuries. Landes was right: there will always be a place for books such as these, for they fulfill a basic human instinct to impose some order on the past.

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Isaiah Berlin --Russian Thinkers

I was reading Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers today and I came across two interesting spots in his A remarkable Decade--The birth of the Russian Intelligentsia.

Most historians are agreed that the great social schism between the educated and the 'dark folk' in Russian history sprang from the wound inflicted on Russian society by Peter the Great. In his reforming zeal Peter sent selected young men into the Western world, and when they had acquired the languages of the West and the various new arts and skills which sprang from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, brought them back to become the leaders of that new social order which, with ruthless and violent haste, he imposed upon his feudal land. In this way he created a small class of new men, half Russian, half foreign--educated abroad, even if they were Russian by birth; these, in due course, became a small managerial and bureaucratic oligarchy, set above the people, no longer sharing in their still-medieval culture; cut off from them irrevocably. The government of this large and unruly nation became constantly more difficult, as social and economic conditions in Russia increasingly diverged from the progressing West. With the widening of the gulf, greater and greater repression had to be exercised by the ruling elite. The small group of governors thus grew more and more estranged from the people they were set to govern.

In many ways it makes me think of the Liberal elite you find in the Democratic party, not to speak of the Liberal Elite you find here in the South. Doctors and Lawyers, and managerial class types who go off to fancy schools and learn more empirically based, ideologically driven approaches to thinking and living.

There is a major disconnect between educated and poorly educated people in the south--errr in this country at large; which you don't see in Europe. Working class intellectuals are few and far between now. I used to read stories about working class intellectuals and communities in the north during the industrialization and immigration waves in the early 1900's. You don't see that now.

You can see the impact of this in voters who vote against their economic interest. People who rage against evolution and global warming because they are theories--yet stare at you blankly when you point out that gravity is a theory, that the sun coming up is a theory.

There is an educational disconnect and it breeds contempt from both sides towards the other side.

Further into the essay I come across something that speaks to the fact that one should really never try to avoid BAD, because it usually creates WORSE...

[there was] an unwillingness of the government to let its subjects travel to France, which was thought of, particularly to let its subjects travel to France, which was thought of, particularly after 1830, as a chronically revolutionary country, liable to perpetual upheavals, blood-letting, violence and chaos. By contrast, Germany lay peaceful under the heel of a very respectable despotism. Consequently, young Russians were encouraged to go to German universities, where they would obtain a sound training in civic principles that would, so it was supposed, make them still more faithful servants of the Russian autocracy.

The result was the exact opposite. Crypto-Francophile sentiment in Germany itself was at this time so violent, and enlightened Germans themselves believed in ideas--in this case those of the French Enlightenment--much more intensely and fanatically than the French themselves, that the young Russian Anacharsies who dutifully went to Germany were infected by dangerous ideas far more violently there than they could ever have been had they gone to Paris in the easy-going early years of Louis-Philippe. The government of Nicholas I could hardly have foreseen the chasm into which it was destined to fall.

Can't help but think of many restrictions on speech, and behaviors such as drugs, abortion, and prostitution which have only made things worse rather than better...

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com

Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623)

In Michael Allen Gillespie's The Theological Origins of Modernity in the chapter on Hobbes he mentions Paolo Sarpi and states

During this time in Italy, he [Hobbes] may have heard or met Paolo Sarpi, the nominalist nad materialist who David Whootton has called the only admitted atheist of his age.

hmmm... must look into this guy!!

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Jim Nichols
A Speculative Fiction
www.JimNichols4.com