sooooo..what does this mean?

REID: I’m saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That’s very clear.

QUESTION: No one’s talking about releasing them. We’re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.

REID: Can’t put them in prison unless you release them.

QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? …

REID: I can’t make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.

I don't follow how they'd have to be "released" in order to put them into prison. I presume they could mean by following due process of law and having a trial, but it would be a simple matter of denying bail owing to the charges involved.

Democrats, upon reflection, are really lucky to have Obama around. Because Reid and Pelosi are looking increasingly dumb (and Biden's not much help either).

Let me know when someone is actually proposing releasing these terrorists on American soil. That would be a fun argument. This is mere stupidity of the highest order.

Mississippi is like Bosnia

And Arkansas is like Russia

And Cuba is better off than both of them. Human development index is a more expansive measure than pure economic activity (like GDP). You're also looking at education and literacy, basic health. Iceland and other Scandinavian countries typically top the list. But when you break states off independently, we can see there's a core, mostly of the NE but also some other big states spread throughout the country, that fare just about as well as any nation in the world. The problem is that there's this core of Southern states that fare just about as badly as developing nations that drags the total national average down. Basically if you live in Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia, or Mississippi, you're living in a third world country. Presumably we could isolate further down and look at individual counties within these states and find that some of the cities might be doing fairly well within them, but others not so much.

What would be the cause of this disparity? Well educational systems in New England and portions of the Midwest are far superior when one breaks out individual state scores on international educational rankings. And the vast majority of the least healthy states are in that list as well. Now within the comments people are quibbling because there's Wal-Marts all over the place to make goods and services cheap and affordable. Likewise, the vast expense of buying arable or inhabitable land in California or NYC may inflate the GDP figures there. There may be a reason to adjust for cost of living within a nominal GDP calculation. But it would seem obvious that general lack of economic activity given within a cheap retail environment and a basically rural area with an undereducated and unhealthy population isn't a recipe for future growth either.

One other interesting part is the political disparity that this creates: the lower states also tended to go vote for "conservatives". In reference to the general anti-intellectual basis that "conservatives" have come to represent, this isn't terribly surprising that the least educated or developed states would somehow come to demand less progressive policies.

More interesting still is this map. Take a look at the Eastern economic development zones versus the rest of the country... You can clearly see Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou/Hong Kong. And then there's Tibet.

credit companies get tightened

credit crunching the numbers

I only see one provision that will have some long-term unintended consequences: restricting issuing credit cards to people under 21. That's a good trick to quickly build up your credit if you're under 21, but this is balanced by the tendency of such people to 1) have no income and 2) rack up debts. It will have the effect of slowing the ability of people getting access to credit, and thus make mortgage rates potentially higher in the long run for many (or boost the re-fi markets).

The rest of these provisions seem reasonable and account for a number of bad faith practices.
1) Statements to be mailed out faster. This was a trick being used for people who still used snail mail for their payments (most people). The statement arrives with only a few days left to pay on it. Similarly if a payment was processed slowly, say by intentionally putting the due date on a weekend when it wouldn't have gone through anyway, there shouldn't be a fee assessed. Credit companies have used both of these tricks against their customers for a while.

2) 45 days instead of 15 to change rates. This gives people an extra month to make extra payments at a lower interest rate. Fine with that. There's also an added grace period of an extra month to account for the possibility of someone goofing up once or twice and making a single payment late (or not at all) rather than providing a record of being chronically late and/or missing payments entirely. Gotcha rates, the promotional introductory rate that gets advertised on the envelope rather than the actual long term interest rate that comes sort of prominently in the mice type legalese, would have to last longer and rates generally would be frozen for the first year. I do foresee this may impact the ability of people with poorer credit getting access to credit, but since this sort of method has been used to jack up interest rates on people and cycle them into debt spirals rather than help them build up credit (predatory lending of a sort), I'm not all that worried about it. If poor people cannot get access to credit cards, they have one less source of poverty on one point but one less way out if they're smart about them. This is rare.

3) Rates reduce back to a previously agreed level after a payment on-time period is demonstrated. I have not quite understood why credit companies haven't done this in the past. Or why they've arbitrarily raised rates without a late payment (though there are some goofy reasons, such as a reduced credit score for this).

Now if they can get some rules to apply to bank debit cards with a credit logo on them we're doing good.

Of course, the Senate version has a nice rider attached that has something to do with gun restrictions in national parks. I can see what that has to do with credit cards...

Hats on the ringer. Or something needs to be said without a finger

So since the President can wander into the hornet's nest of a incoherent debate and make it sound presentable, so shall I attempt to make sense.

I've ranted previously on the problems with the framing of the debate surrounding abortion, particularly this false dichotomy of "pro-life/pro-abortion". That's not something I've changed my reasoning for. But I am willing to examine the relevant issues behind the curtain, so to speak.

What it comes down to ultimately is the ability of each individual person to exercise their conscience and make decisions. We recognize that these decisions carry unique and powerful consequences at times, and where these consequences are tragic, painful, and harmful to others, we often have the means and justification to step in and apply a measure of justice or judgment. The central argument of the "pro-life/anti-choice" side is that these harms apply to fertilized embryos and developing fetuses just as they would to any fully formed and helpless infant. Yet we have not established the criteria, either scientifically or metaphysically, for demonstrating what life (in the human sense) is and where on the time line that begins. Each person then is left to that decision themselves.

The supposition becomes that somehow permitting such decisions to be made without overriding legal scrutiny in their aftermath somehow abolishes the difficulty of making them. Or that abolishing the legality of these decisions also abolishes the practice. Neither is true, or ever has been. Procedures for abortions can still be performed in the absence of legality. Often less safely, often without trained medical care, and often at greater expense. But like any other demand we label as illicit, the demand still exists outside the boundaries of law. Likewise, it cannot be said that most women would choose such a path with greater and greater ease. Or in fact that they would often feel that have much of a choice at all in the absence of sensible alternatives (such as would be commonly available to say, the upper middle class with access to proper medical care and precautionary methods reducing the likelihood of making such a problematic situation arise in the first place versus the impoverished, undereducated classes of our society that have neither opportunity afforded them in a sufficiency worth contemplating).

Much as I find I despise the ordinary person, it seems best to afford them the maximum ability to determine their own courses, and to make every effort that that course should be less burdened. I do not say that people who hold a strong and discordant view must be silenced and led out of arenas when they express their dissatisfaction. But I do demand that they be respectful that not all hold their views and that there are reasonable positions that should be listened to, if not perhaps agreed with. Where there are sensible positions that are expressed I will listen. It seems to me the central goal of anti-abortion advocates is to lessen the frequency of such events. I see no reason that a policy cannot be devised to achieve this end, still falling short of legally penalizing the women who seek out abortions or doctors perform them. If that sort of goal is achieved (and in case "they" haven't been paying attention, the rate of abortions per pregnancy has been falling for at least the last 25 years), then I fail to see what the demands are about nor the consistency with which they are made in light of the expressed demands for "government to get out of our lives" in other avenues of life's strange and tumultuous exhibitions.

So to try to understand what these demands have been about, I engaged with those who hold them to try to get at their points of view:

1) Abortion is infanticide.
First off, infanticide is nothing new in both the historical and social spectrum. The ancient Romans and Greeks so often revered in American society were among its practitioners. It was often practiced as a means of population control in smaller societies with scarce public resources available and for which the survival of any extra person could mean starvation for the whole (and thus the questionable survival of a young and helpless infant to begin with). There are sound structural arguments to be made that the health of a society is threatened mightily by the introduction of large numbers of ill-cared for or undesired/unplanned children as the result of pregnancies that were not terminated (and for which a rational prospective mother might still retain a desire for children at a more appropriate time). Crime for example is strained by such an increase in what would psychologically be termed "at risk children". Educational systems, often from lower income areas already pushed beyond their ability to service their students, would likewise require social accommodations. If we are not willing to permit the exercise of choice to have children at a desirable time and ability for prospective parents, then are we not bound to consider the costs that such a cumulative and forcible imposition of our own societal choice has wrought for us at a later date? If we are not, then why would we wish to impose a cost on ourselves for which someone else could ably supply at some other time?

Secondly, and more pressing, it is still not possible to establish unquestionably that human life begins at conception. It doesn't even do this naturally. Every time a measure comes along attempting to punish the few unwilling parents who commit some atrocity to a newborn infant, sometimes after a failed abortion attempt, the laws as drafted are so draconian as to make little differentiation between the natural and tragic personal event of a miscarriage and that of a child killed, or a pregnancy terminated, by deliberate circumstances. Where the circumstances are obvious I should think there are laws and judgments to be made, and we can already make them (just as there used to be a convincing argument to be had regarding existing laws on terrorism, now swept aside in favor of torture, often by the same people who oppose abortion...consistency....consistency people). Where they are questionable surroundings, we may be able to question, but not to intrude with guns blazing.

We have not been able to craft definitive laws on these matters because our legal system has not definitively used a process to declare when a human being is endowed with these natural and unalienable rights prior to its natural live birth. It fundamentally cannot because that determination would make the presumption, however well intentioned and well-founded that may be, that all such developments will take their course and provide a living breathing infant and all the trials or tribulations, as well as joys and wonders, that accompany such things. They do not, even in the natural order. Were we to suggest that habits which increase the likelihood of a "natural" miscarriage, such as say smoking or drinking, be criminalized for a pregnant and prospective mother there would be, or at least one would expect, a public outcry equally divisive and suggesting of a troubling introduction of governmental meddling with the private affairs of its citizens. Simply being over 40 for example is a troubling condition for the development of a fetus into a healthy infant. How would we best attack this problem with the full force of legal powers to protect the developing child with society's blessing? Again we cannot. If we cannot protect and guarantee human life with every contraceptive event through legal authorities then I dare say we haven't yet found it's source in a scientific and metaphysical form. It would be a simple matter at that point. Since it is not a simple matter, it remains instead to allow individuals to exercise as best they may their conscience when the question is put forth in their own minds on how to proceed. For individuals who feel it is a simple matter, it becomes one. They don't have to have abortions. There is no formal or informal state policy of infanticide being adopted like that of the ancient Romans or even the more modern Chinese "one child" policy that is often pointed to with disdain. For everyone else, this decision remains challenging. And we are amazingly still free to make it more difficult still by disagreeing with a particular course of action. Even in public, but ideally without resorting to violence or judgmental acts of disrespect.

2) If we do not endow a fetus with human rights, what is stop someone from deciding freely through the exercise of their conscience that say, Mexicans, are not human and how would we be consistent to punish their actions. Here we have drawn clear legal distinctions. Once a person is alive through birth, we create legal structures as a means of guarding against things like unilateral intolerance and genocidal activity. Again, since there isn't a clear argument that a human being becomes such at the inception of a fertilized egg, there has to be a clear argument agreed upon socially that there is a point where a human being gains their human rights. There are vague legal opinions offered that this occurs at some time before birth and we legally prevent most abortions from occurring past that point, excepting in extreme cases for the health of a pregnant woman for example. At birth, we are permitted the activity of our mind in the pursuit of prejudicial opinions and biases. We are not permitted the depravity to slaughter or abuse others on the sole basis that we feel they are less human or not human. This is a silly point to have to make in a debate, but it comes up frequently made by ardent anti-abortion advocates. As though there is a distributed playbook to run down a series of ridiculous arguments with the idea being that only someone who holds these ridiculous opinions would oppose their viewpoint. It's not the only one

3) No distinction or quarter is to be made between people who allow abortions to go forward by not enacting laws to penalize anyone involved and the actual people who choose freely to have the procedure or to perform it. All are then painted with the broad stroke of "pro-abortion". Most accurately, the label is "pro-choice", with the understanding that a large percentage of such peoples would personally oppose many conditions for having abortions of their own. Even the women who would have them are often in a considerable state of doubt and uncertainty. "Roe" for example became opposed to abortion at a later point in her life. Judging from that sort of turnaround, it seems natural to allow consciences to be exercised free from legal scrutiny and consequence, but it would still be possible to do so with the opposition of society or with the support of its essential members (our friends or family). Such consequences are often more unbearable than anything we could assemble as a legal penalty to exact for a perceived injustice. As such, it remains to assemble a means to make these consequences more infrequent, by providing better and intelligent access to alternatives, and to use social infrastructures without the calcified and inflexible force of legal authoritarians to impose them more freely. They work. Legal authority simply guarantees a series of intractable consequences to the greater society that no one is prepared to deal with and does precious little to restrict the demands of people who would seek out abortions in whatever dire circumstances they feel necessary to have one. Rather it structurally limits who has access to them to precisely the same group that already has sufficient safeguards to limit the need in the first place: generally upper-middle classes of people.

4) Sex should not be "guilt-free" or without consequence.
It remains to understand that an advocacy structured on abstinence will generally fail to achieve its goals, because it often fails to educate responsibly its target audience, and that there is nothing inherently damaging about sex itself that we should be labeling it as a "guilt-free" activity where people must move to remove any perceived damages it creates upon its participants. This assumption that human sexuality outside of some sanctified marriage is somehow automatically bad is itself creating a good deal of social difficulty as it then creates legal and social distinctions on marriage itself (see: gay rights being limited). Sexuality carries already a good number of consequences in the form of transmittable disease risks. Pregnancy is, by comparison, the lesser concern, and also happens to be the concern that is by nature more private. Disease has social implications and costs to be managed by appropriate public response. One such response is to educate. Another is to demand accountable or responsible behavior. This response is based, strangely for what is largely a religious movement, on the ideal human behavior. One assumes that if human beings are largely unaccountable and prone to "sin", that there should be measures employed not merely to "prevent sin" but to account for any damages upon others. We do this in criminal acts and such people are often the first to demand stringent penalties, and yet there is no accountability for a baser human impulse toward sex? Would it not be sensible to assume, even though this is itself a flawed assumption on its face, that all people would seek to engage in sexual practices at some point almost certainly before we have some established social procedure that permits them to do so, at least without malicious intentions, and then design a policy that acts on this assumption? Why the dichotomy between some actions which can harm but one or a few (or even just the self in the form of our drug laws or attempts at "anti-homosexual"/sodomy laws for consensual adults, some of whom would be heterosexual married couples...) and actions which could harm many through ignorance or maliciousness equally?

When this sort of anti-intellectual, "god wills it" culture is subsided and replaced with a greater sense of personal accountability rather than "I will make you feel accountable because MY god says so", I think we'd have a more reasonable approach toward difficult subjects like abortion and I suspect we'd have a lot fewer abortions performed. The hypocritical double standards therein are, based on my previous post, precisely what is so offending people who leave their organized religious institutions behind and precisely why so many people in this country have stratified opinions on this subject that make it virtually impossible to have a coherent debate. Fortunately for all of us so long as there isn't a coherent debate, there won't be much in the form of legal activity. Maybe the discordant shouting is what we all wanted in the first place and so long as there won't be any policies getting made one way or the other, then it's a tossup whether anything will be getting done or not. So we can continue shouting.

shocking parsed news

"across all religious upbringings, roughly three-quarters of those who have become unaffiliated say religious people tend to be hypocritical and judgmental rather than sincere and forgiving"

The interesting part is looking over the reasons people leave religious affiliations. It does not look like, in the suspicious attitudes of hardline religious people in all corners of America, there's some sort of atheistic revolution underway. It looks more like there's a revolt against organized religion and overtly religious peoples. When you get down to something like "modern science proves religion is just superstition" and see a very small percentage relative to something like the hypocrisy of other religious people or the influence of money and power on organized religion, or especially with the fast growing disagreements with various institutional rules and dogma, then you're not seeing the sort of Richard Dawkins brand of atheism take any shape.

The more relevant conclusions were the displeasure with religious doctrines relating to homosexuality and abortion. I've seen the preposterous claim that somehow younger people are "pro-life" and that this is how social conservatives would get them back involved in their causes. Based on something like this (along with general polls on abortion itself), I'd say that's quite funny if that's the plan. Good luck with that. When that beats out birth control as a complaint of former Catholics (and in case you missed it, the Catholic Church is big on being anti-birth control), something is wrong with the assumption that these are wedge issues that will involve people in an overriding ideological stance.

The more unusual statistics are in the following of "unaffiliated" peoples. The apparent concern that people will hold to these sort of absent practices, given that they're not reaching these conclusions from the perspective that any religious institution is flawed or based on superstitious nonsense, is probably unfounded. In fact, if the goal and perspective of the "unaffiliated" was a larger movement toward atheist tendencies generally, then it would appear to be failing wildly (for the record, I have no such ambitions to "convert" others, I just find the conversations amusing). It looks more like the same religious institutions that would be in competition for this population are failing faster at attracting them back into some institutional faith as the actual issue. The issue would then be that there's less of a parsing of data to determine whether "unaffiliated" actually means much of anything. I usually see polling data with something like "spiritual, not religious" and "agnostic/atheist" rather than "unaffiliated". The latter term is pretty broad, and provides a good deal of hope for the religious institutions that people have fled to recover some of these lost goods. If they have the ability to be more "flexible" in their moral teachings and have less hypocritical/judgmental worshipers at least. I suppose in some sense I can live with the population awakening to these flaws at least. They do tend to be the most glaring problem with human spiritual practices.

happiness is a pair of socks away

happiness takes time to look at

I noticed a couple threads in there that I liked, sort of. As much as I am impressed by anything.

One: the notion that many people are defensive about how they are liked, complimented, or generate any affections. That sort of intimacy is rare, cultivated, and difficult. And supposedly rewarding. We shelter these feelings carefully because they are difficult to act upon in part, but mostly because it's easier for (many of) us to make decisions for much of our life in the belief that they're absent. This isn't a surprising revelation of course.

Culturally speaking it's far more common to see detailed descriptions events and effects of offensive nature, however common or rare they may be in our daily itinerary, than to depict a event where we were ourselves unselfish, altruistic, helpful. And yet these latter events surely happen, even among the most selfish and narcissistic people. Among others, it's likely we see them so rarely in part in the attempt to avoid the narcissism. We share the painful memories because it's like passing them off, a therapeutic effect of sorts. We create private shelters for these moments of joy and then never relive them through a story because we content to know we touched someone in some trivial way even if it was much more important than that. I noticed in reading about and watching "Band of Brothers" that one got the distinct impression there were a lot of heroic acts from what otherwise were ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. But no one saw themselves as THE hero. Especially Winters, who seems to have come down that way in the eyes of the men he led. And none of them seemed content to let that be their story. They seemed more interested in telling stories of someone else's heroism, but willing instead to convey the moments of privation, suffering, and death, however saddened they were by these often intense memories. Maybe combat is a bad example, but it really doesn't seem much different from the rest of life. It's simply more intense with the prospect of death much closer and yet more distant at the same time (because of its commonplace occurrence).

Two: I'm not sure what Valliant's take actually is on whether people change or not, which seemed to be the notional topic of the final page. But it seemed to me like crucial elements form up rather quickly in our lives and they frame the perspectives and motions for a lot of later life. These things in themselves may be replaced by others, and these may change in some measure our degree of involvement in our own life. But it seemed to me like the same tragic flaws, in the literary sense, run throughout. The ideal person adapts better around them (by changing the surrounding environment to conceal them usually), but that doesn't mean their essential character adapts. The sort of static impression that we're the same at 50 as we are at 25 is obviously going to be an over simplified notion. We learn things of course, and we have different experiences. But we're having to process these things through the same mind, it's the same entity making judgments, decisions, actions, and intentions. I don't quite see how this essential person creates a new element, ie, changes. Maturity is a vague assessment of how people cope with different things at different times in their life spectrum. I'm not convinced that it alters the underlying meaning of the story however. It's basically like adding a more complex vocabulary to events rather than using something like a more accurate equation to how we balance ourselves.

In other news, I discovered this week that I have apparently never purchased socks. I discovered this flaw by realizing that they've been depleting themselves over the past year down to a pitifully small collection from their inherent weaknesses when I have use for them. Since one tends to dispose of socks when they discover they've born holes in their soles or some such injuries, and this occurs typically in ones rather than twos, and one tends to be supplied with such footwear in bundled quantities that all match each other anyway, this is a strangely predictable phenomenon. Even within independence, I have generally had contact with at least one other person who procured some socks. So I have managed to cook, and sort of clean, and to marginally care for animals at the expense of other human beings. But not buy socks. I submit this problem lies in the overuse of flip-flops. But then again, Einstein typically wore his socks around his neck, if at all. And I seem to wear them inside-out all the time, which I'm not sure how this works within their design either. Much like ties I'm not really sure they're a good "functional" piece of clothing. Couldn't we just have longer pants when it is cold out and better designed running shoes to prevent blisters or some such?

As a final note, I finally got around to deleting the old myspace page. Facebook has long since taken over for whatever semblance of contact I have with the outside world and the current tendency not to be bombarded with popular culture on every log-in tends to make this tenuous attempt at meaningful human contact at least tolerable.

unconventional thinking

insurgency works

There's a disconnection however that isn't applied here. Winning a war of attrition and effort through asymmetrical tactics and guerrilla warfare does not automatically translate toward the goals that the war is supposedly fought for. Or at least, there are still different asymmetrical tactics that need to be followed to make the post-war phase successful. Lawrence of Arabia is justly famous for driving the Ottoman empire to distraction with a band of nomadic tribesmen to compose his forces. The post-war phase however does not conclude with an independence or equality among nations, it basically just resulted in the trade from Ottoman control to British and French controls. The same problem can be applied to the current Palestianian situation, with guerrilla tactics working more "effectively" than conventional warfare had against Israeli forces. But they haven't resulted in any clear legitimacy in the post war sense, mostly because there's this unwritten rule that engaging in asymmetric warfare is a cardinal sin in international politics. Politics has its own rules that can be different, but act to reinforce those of war itself. Gladwell brings up Washington's insistence on fighting actual battles when it was clearly more effective to tire the British out with untrained and ill-equipped troops using guerrilla warfare (Indian style fighting). But what worked in the post-war phase here was in part continuing to pursue a sort of asymmetry in politics. Americans essentially persisted in guerrilla tactics by abandoning centuries of divine right law and permanent aristocracy rigidly imposed by birth rights and obtuse legal codes and experimenting with something new. And they got away with it basically because they'd won the war by being somewhat unconventional to begin with. Everyone (in as far as the British and many in the French establishment were concerned) basically assumed that what was being tried was doomed to fail anyway so why not let them do it and demonstrate it would. The same situation in Arabia, Iraq, and Syria later presented itself and the British and French allowed the Arabs to crumble and fail, "requiring" the international restoration of order through the imperial status quo (just a different set of flags). Why did that fail, and in many respects continues to, when Washington and the first Americans succeeded (albeit with some false starts)?

I'd think that would be just as interesting a question as watching how Lawrence marched a bunch of nomads around the desert and prevailed in bleeding out the Turkish armies opposing him. Perhaps the question of timing helps here. Americans and their failings took months to hear of and months more to react to by the status quo Europeans. This was far too much trouble to be concerned with measures of control in the first place I suppose. But by the early 20th century, unrest and revolt in the Trans-Jordan area could be heard of and acted upon within days. There was a substantial global and imperial means to both gather information and respond before anything really trans-formative, or perhaps dangerous, happened. The same rules did not apply some 50 years later after the collapse of these imperial forces and exhaustion from a second war. The French no longer possessed the means to outlast and crush rebellion from their Asian colonies. And this showed when the Vietnamese for example managed to change tactics and bleed out the occupying force. It's possible the same "rules" will apply very soon to American forces, and it's a world we should be ready to respond to with something other than conventional tactics. Or we should expect some trans-formative, some perhaps dangerous, things to happen.

One should also wonder if we've already passed that invisible line in the sand. Not just because we watched planes crash into buildings, or even prior to that, watched a country we had been opposing for decades crumble into something new without any idea that it was about to happen. But because our leaders decided that the means of resistance to change was to abandon some of our most fundamental rights and treat terrorists with the same level of impudence that they acted with. Terrorists are justly considered by any legal system as scum, once convicted. What we adopted over the past years was an ancient (medieval would be the best term) means of attempting to impose the "truth" upon others through violence. I don't think that's what I would suggest as unconventional thinking, partly because such means have never worked. And partly because such means are a violation of our own rules. Our sense of decency which is so offended by acts of inconsiderate violence should likewise be offended when we ourselves cross those lines. There's a way to be unconventional and still be decent. There are always ways to "cheat" the system without being a cheater, as Gladwell demonstrated. I should think it's a lot easier to look at ourselves in the mirror that way at least than to have to tell our progeny that they only have what freedoms they have, such as they'd have left, because we beat and abused a few thousand people into telling us what we wanted to hear.

excellent point

schools are just buildings

Logically, we don't need to build structures and many forms of infrastructure in these conquered territories. They already had that sort of figured out. The problem (although I don't think English was necessarily the right subject matter, Arabic or Pashtu maybe) is the lack of qualified educators to fill the schools with their actual purpose: learning. I'd guess this is a no-brainer for any country other than America which does a terrible job figuring out how to educate its underclass of citizens and only a moderately good job of figuring out how to educate its best and brightest.

stale ideologue versus fresh ideologue

More steam rising

Sort of where we are right now is watching the total meltdown of an entire political viewpoint into a stew-like mess without any coherent plan, without any reference points internally to keep it on something like a track. So the suggestion that somehow what was needed is new faces regurgitating the same swill as the old folks who've fallen out of public favor is tragically silly. We already saw this plan in action with Sarah Palin over the last election cycle. There was some energy within their party, but lots of energy mobilizing against these new party ideologues. Similarly we saw Bobby Jindal make a ridiculous rambling attempt at speech after Obama's not-state of the union speech and fail to harmonize any general public support against what may be publicly perceived (even real) concerns that exist in our minority views.

The "fresh face" doesn't do them any good if it raises and makes no points with anyone outside their own conservative echo chambers. There are a few spare marbles in the conservative playbook that may have some play in them (budgetary control and tax reform for example), but they're not the ones that the party base seems interested in rallying around. At least, they're not capable of being taken seriously on these issues because they refused to acknowledge them as problems which occurred or even started during their own reign of power.

It's fun for people who have long had a third party affiliation (at least a superficial one). But it's not fun if the opposing party now gets to enact their own ideological morass upon the rest of us on the basis that being in power allows people to "believe that the objective of government is to satisfy their own personal preferences, and bugger everyone else."

America's chickens!

This is what I mean by protectionist rhetoric

So yeah. That explains a lot. There's also the 1920 Jones Act that limits traffic on US waterways to US manufactured shipping. And thus explaining why we do not build boats the rest of the world would want anymore. At least of the non-defense variety. And we wonder why our industrial capacity has slipped so.