mclarenblog.com

You should seriously consider looking at and consider buying the March/April 2013 issue of Foreign Policy magazine (How Not To Win A War).  It does an excellent job of looking back to how the United States has done such a poor job at waging war.  I used the word “poor” while others may substitute the word “incompetent”.  The issue mainly cites Afghanistan in its analysis.  As part of this issue, they reveal how President Obama allowed for  similar failed administration process as George W. Bush for sanitizing people working on the war effort (revealed in Imperial Life In The Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran) by stuffing under qualified individuals into positions of war and “nation building” buy having each individual pass the political litmus test of allegiance to their “leader” (in the case of George W. Bush that would be Chaney and his neocon ideology).    A whole lot of ideas come out of this issue that are not explicit stated but one can most easily pull out of the issue:

• Evidently no one in high office even thinks of conducting deep choice analysis prior to invasions of foreign countries.
• The US Military method of waging war is land grab.
• The US always takes on the method of looking down upon the country being invaded and imposing our views and methods.
• The US Military can really run it off the rails when it gets involved in deciding policy.
• The CIA can really ruin the war effort when it gets involved in deciding policy.
• The U.S. State Department expertise is not appreciated, under utilized as a result, because their business is seen as making sausage.  Presidents seem unable to comprehend political complexity, want it simple.

Prior to the 2012 presidential election I had written some blog articles that were pretty critical of some individual’s intellectual process for supporting a candidate. party and party platform.  I had been following the political happenings prior to the election and my perception was this election was going to be close.  Me and my friends were even scared that Romney would win and set our county back into more oligarch control.  I was vastly surprised, almost shocked, at the election results.  I still can not believe that the electorate figured it out pretty well.  I still stand by my prior blog posts that many individuals have a single issue or two that really is important to them.  My problem with this approach, in my mind, is politics comprises a lot of issues and I think it to be a better choice to measure as many as you can and then draw a broader conclusion.  Well that is simply not going to happen.  People are really drawn into just one or two political issues.  But then, what did happen in this past election?  My only conclusion is there must be a collective intelligence.  If we take all the one and two issue people and put them all together, the issues that each finds important would naturally differ.  If each person was pretty good at figuring out what was the best outcome to pursue for “their” issue then might we then have a pretty good collective intelligence?   I am still toying with this as an explanation because I am out of any other ideas.

I have a membership with a health club where quite a few GOP business people attend.    Many of these people are quite rich.  The men’s locker room is often times loud with anti Obama opinions.  In particular, I watched one individual who was against Obama right after he won the presidency.  I did not think his view as because of prejudice.  The man is very good at investing money but I am soon to realize that he may be stupid about people and social issues.  I am always trying to figure out things to a logical conclusion and I just could not figure out why so many GOP men held such strong opinions against the president.  Just prior to President Obama running for president a second time and about a week or two before the election was held, the Wall Street Journal ran some articles describing how just about all the financial institutions donated vast sums of money to the Romney campaign and virtually nothing to Obama.

August 27, 2012: Private Equity Political Donations Soar; Romeny, GOP Receive Lion’s Share

August 27, 2012: Wall Street’s Singer Makes His Influence Felt

October 9, 2012: Political Wisdom: Goldman Drops Obama for Romney.

The articles stated (in my words) that Obama failed to genuflect to the financial institution wishes.  The financial institutions wanted even more profits and someone who they could more easily control.  When Obama won the presidency with an impressive margin a second time, I began to realize that the business leaders of all those financial institutions totally failed to understand how this nation was changing, failed to predict the election, failed to understand the social forces that were changing since the past four years.  They wasted vast sums of money and failed to buy access.  One might go so far as claiming that they were below the intelligence level of the very people who voted for Obama.  If this is actually true, then why do we give business leaders so much credit for course corrections on issues outside of their personal knowledge?  Might we require that business people who have political influence in government policy  not go beyond what they directly understand?

There is quite a full range for believing and promoting the importance of organized religion from non participation with total lack of concern along with atheism at one extreme and fervent adherance to a religon at the other extreme. What should be realized by all is that religion is a comfort mechanism. It is not an absolute. It is in the mind and not based in any reality except when the mind thinks it is so.

The Orange County Register (Calif), reports (Nov.1, 2012, News 8) that Romney would do better than Obama at breaking the logjam in Washington.  The difference was ten percent.   I believe that news reports have revealed that the Tea Party, a right side wing nuts of the GOP party, decided on the political tactic to obstruct, stop any cooperation with the Democrats.  What might this suggest of the people participating in the pole?  I might suspect stupid.