Private Mars Rocket II

I've said before that history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme. Comes today another article that I will mostly just point and and say "ditto:" Political Violence and the Great Disinhibition. Josh Marshall, the author, points out that America actually has a long history of violence.

Although he doesn't think we're in for another civil war, he does see a historical parallel - the Gilded Age (1870 - 1900). That era had a lot of violence, both political (from the Left and the Right) to include lynchings, assassinations and labor strife. There was also widespread economic drama and fear of immigration. Sound familiar?

I'll add to that one tidbit - the reason we call it the Gilded Age was because a group of wealthy Americans was trying (and frequently succeeding) in buying themselves political power which they used to further enrich themselves. Paging President Musk - President Musk please pick up a white courtesy phone.

This article claims Trump is a final warning to elites. Specifically, the (Canadian) author says elites need to come up with policies that "play to Peoria." He cites NAFTA and the "war on coal" as examples, and asks what is somebody who gets "C's" in high school supposed to do.

Here's the dirty little secret. First, coal. What's causing the coal-mining industry to collapse is methane, AKA natural gas. Thanks to fracking, natural gas is cheap. It's a fluid, thus easier to work with, generates no ash and very little stack pollutants. In short, coal is on the way out.

Second, factory jobs. US industrial output is up and has been increasing for some time. But the number of industrial workers hasn't been going up as fast. Simply put, more and more factory jobs are automated. The biggest industry not automated, garment making, is running offshore. (That's why your skivvies are made in Bangladesh.) A change in trade policy can bring some of those garment jobs back, but its only a matter of time before automation hits that industry.

In short, many of the employment problems facing the working class are structural, and the market forces are all oriented to making these structural problems worse. As a species, we'll have to fix the problem, for some value of "fix." But it's not going to be easy.

I said that I would have more comments on James Fallow's article The Tragedy of the American Military. Herewith are my thoughts, as emailed to Mr. Fallows:

Dear Mr. Fallows:

I read your article “The Tragedy of the American Military” with interest. I did a short stint in the largely peacetime Navy in the early 1990s, but my approach to your article was historical.

They say history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes, and I find that right now, the 21st Century is rhyming with the 19th. In our century, the US is playing the role Great Britain played in the 19th – namely dominant power. I find the other parallels striking.

In both cases, the dominant power had a military organized to fight Over There, with large navies and relatively small, professional armies. In both cases, lip service is paid to the military (see Kipling’s “Tommy” for an example) but actual attention is not. At least, as long as the wars are Over There.

In your article, you expressed dismay that no US general was relieved of command in Iraq or Afghanistan for incompetence. In Victorian Britain, Raglan and Cardigan, the generals who bumbled their way into the Charge of the Light Brigade, weren't cashiered but rather promoted. The Charge itself, rather than being seen as an epic screw-up, was lionized as a heroic effort. (Tennyson, the man doing the lionization and Poet Laureate, had no military experience, like many of the elite of his day.)

I would also like to comment on our failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the need for a commission to examine them. I submit that no commission is needed. General Shinseski told Congress on the eve of Iraq that we would need around 250,000 troops to occupy Iraq. Since Afghanistan has roughly the same population, I would assume we would need the same number of troops there. Our highest troop count in either country was barely half of that.

I also submit that, if less than a year after 9/11 the idea of a draft is so toxic that nobody will seriously float the idea, the US will probably not be able (or more accurately, politically willing) to radically increase the size of our Army – certainly not to the level needed to support an occupation force of a quarter of a million. Therefore the simple lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan is either:

1) Don’t invade countries that will require an occupation force of over 100,000, or:
2) Make sure you have sufficient troops lined up from allies to cover the gap, or:
3) Plan on raising native auxiliaries, recognizing said auxiliaries are never as effective, loyal or efficient as US troops.

Chris Gerrib

I was going to talk about Sarah Palin dropping $150 large* of donated money on her wardrobe but I decided not to. That's a shame, since I had a nice rant ready, but it doesn't move the needle. If you think McCain's campaign can't pour piss out of a boot, (they ever hear of hiring a consultant to make these buys?) well, this is more proof. If you think McCain is the only thing standing between us and the Socialist Republic of America, you've got an excuse. Instead, I decided to take a science fiction spin, and discuss what I think the rest of this century will (or at least could, for my writing's sake) look like.

History doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes, and I think our future century will rhyme with the one experienced by Great Britain starting in 1815. Here's a thumbnail of where Britain stood in 1815: They were the premier military power, but not omniscient. Regional powers could, with great effort, block them in their regions, but the homeland was safe. Britain was the leading economic power, but struggling with the internal issues of democracy and the adverse effects of industrialization. Britain was also struggling with a problem we don't really think about now - sanitation. Cholera and dysentery, diseases now only seen in the Third World, were rampant in British cities.

Militarily and economically, I would argue that the US is in the same spot. Yes, we've managed to shoot ourselves in the foot twice - once with the housing bubble and once with the ham-fisted "War on Terror," but being shot in the foot doesn't have to be fatal. Thanks to technology, our homeland is somewhat more vulnerable to attack, although a crippling blow is almost out of the reach of our enemies.

The problem we're struggling with, the one that rhymes (historically speaking) with sanitation is global warming. So here's my first prediction - we'll deal with global warming like the Victorians dealt with decease. Victorian medicine didn't cure deceases. Instead, they built sewers and mosquito nets and stopped bleeding people to cure a fever. In other words, prevention and not doing dumb things.

Thus with global warming. Various scientists are talking about geo-engineering Earth to reduce the impact of carbon emissions. The solutions proposed appear to be feasible at a fairly low cost, at least for a governmental level. Also, we will reduce our dependence on at least one fossil fuel, oil, as the price resets to a higher level.

My second prediction is that we'll still have wars, but that, at least until mid-century, they will relatively low-scale affairs like the Iraq War. Simply put, mid-century is the earliest that emerging powers India or China could pose a credible threat, and Russia's demographics are running the wrong way.

Even mid-century is an aggressive timeline for the emerging powers to get up to a US level. Both the emerging powers are going to have economic downturns, as nothing goes up linearly forever. (Ask your local real-estate broker or investment adviser about that.)

I do think we'll have some serious disruptions around mid-century if not sooner. The Saudi government is a couple of old men away from a constitutional crisis, and as the world transitions away from burning oil, they will get zapped economically. But, their problems will be more of a civil war in nature then a "let's conquer the world."

In world history, the period 1815 - 1870 was relatively peaceful, and after 1870, the next major war was 1914. I suspect that we could have something similar in the period 2008-2050. My hope (and my fiction assumes) that we use that period to go from space exploration to space exploitation.



* "Large" = thousands. She dumped $150,000 of money donated to McCain and/or the RNC.