War Without Exits

Yet even as they celebrate freedom, Americans exempt the object of their veneration from critical examination. In our public discourse, freedom is not so much a word or even a value as an incantation, its very mention enough to stifle doubt and terminate all debate.

...

[Reinhold Niebuhr] entertained few illusions about the nature of man, the possibilities of politics or the pliability of history. Global economic crisis, total war, genocide, totalitarianism, and nuclear arsenals capable of destroying civilization itself -- he viewed all of these with an unblinking eye that allowed no room for hypocrisy, hokum or self-deception. Realism and humility formed the core of his worldview, each infused with a deeply felt Christian sensibility.

Realism in this sense implies an obligation to see the world as it actually is, not as we might like it to be. The enemy of realism is hubris, which in Niebuhr's day, and in our own, finds expression in an outsized confidence in the efficacy of American power as an instrument to reshape the global order.

Humility imposes an obligation of a different sort. It summons Americans to see themselves without blinders. The enemy of humility is sanctimony, which gives rise to the convictions that American values and beliefs are universal and that the nation itself serves providentially assigned purposes. This conviction finds expression in a determination to remake the world in what we imagine to be America's image.

In our own day, realism and humility have proven in short supply. What Niebuhr wrote after World War II proved truer still in the aftermath of the Cold War: Good fortune and a position of apparent preeminence placed the United States "under the most grievous temptations to self-adulation". Americans have given themselves over to those temptations. Hubris and sanctimony have become the paramount expressions of American statecraft.

Page 7, The Limits of Power by Andrew J. Bacevich

"I feel lifeless - more dead than alive."

- Depression Quiz on ask.com

From Karl Clark to Kyoto

It holds more oil than Iraq's proven reserves of 112 billion barrels. It even holds more oil than Saudi Arabia's 250 billion barrels. In fact, Alberta's oil sands deposit contains between 1.75 and 2.5 trillion barrels of oil -- approximately 200 billion barrels of which are recoverable with current technology. That is enough oil to supply all of Canad's petroleum needs for the next 475 years. In fact that is enough proven reserves to supply all of North America's petroleum needs for the next forty-seven years -- without using a single drop of oil from another source. The volume of recoverable oil in the sands is so large that when technological advances prompted the Alberta Energy Utilities Board to include the oil sands as part of Canada's "proven reserves" in 2002, OPEC's share of world petroleum reserves dropped dramatically from 79 to 68 per cent.

Developing Alberta's Oil Sands by Paul Chastko

September 11, 2001

In the picture on ABC News, the North Tower largely blocked their view of the plane hitting the South Tower. Still, they were able to see an enormous blast of smoke behind the North Tower and debris from the explosion falling to the ground below.

"We knew then it was terrorism," Cheney recalls.

p 331, Cheney by Stephen F. Hayes

THE STEPS - CLOSED

Today, the fundamental divisions in American society are not regional or religious but ideological. Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito were not appointed because they were Catholic but because they are conservative. The base of the Republican Party -- from James Dobson and Jay Sekulow among the evangelicals to Ted Olson and Leonard Leo among the Federalists -- recognized that they could use their influence to shape the Court. They organized more, mobilized more, and cared more about the Court than their liberal counterparts. And when their candidate won the presidency, these conservatives demanded more -- a pair of justices who were precisely to their liking (and the ejection of one nominee, Harriet Miers, who was not). With admirable candor, and even greater passion, conservatives have invested in the Court to advance their goals for the country.

In public at least, Roberts himself purports to have a different view of the Court than his conservative sponsors. "Judges are like umpires," he said at his confirmation hearing. "Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them." Elsewhere, Roberts has often said, "Judges are not politicians." None of this is true. Supreme Court justices are nothing at all like baseball umpires. It is folly to pretend that the awesome work of interpreting the Constitution, and thus defining the rights and obligations of American citizenship, is akin to performing the rote, almost mindless task of calling balls and strikes. When it comes to the core of the Court's work, determining the contemporary meaning of the Constitution, it is ideology, not craft or skill, that controls the outcome of cases. As Richard A. Posner, the great conservative judge and law professor, has written, "It is rarely possible to say with a straight face of a Supreme Court constitutional decision that it was decided correctly or incorrectly." Constitutional cases, Posner wrote, "can be decided only on the basis of a political judgment, and a political judgment cannot be called right or wrong by reference to legal norms."

p 338, The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

Our Executive Doesn't

After American and Cuban forces evicted the Spanish from Cuba in 1898, the United States military remained on forty-five square miles along the southern coast of the island. The American presence became official with a treaty signed by the two nations in 1903, eventually setting an annual rent at $4,085. To this day, the American government offers payment to the Cuban government every year, but during the nearly five decades that Fidel Castro has been in power, his government has accepted it only once.

p229, The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

What You Do Not Know

Think of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001: had the risk been reasonably conceivable on September 10, it would not have happened. If such a possibility were deemed worthy of attention, fighter planes would have circled the sky above the twin towers, airplanes would have had locked bulletproof doors, and the attack would not have taken place, period. Something else might have taken place. What? I don't know.

Isn't it strange to see an event happening precisely because it was not supposed to happen?
What kind of defense do we have against that? Whatever you come to know (that New York is an easy terrorist target, for instance) may become inconsequential if your enemy knows that you know it. It may be odd that, in such a strategic game, what you know can be truly inconsequential.

This extends to all businesses. Think about the "secret recipe" to making a killing in the restaurant business. If it were known and obvious, then someone next door would have already come up with the idea and it would have become generic. The next killing in the restaurant industry needs to be an idea that is not easily conceived of by the current population of restauranteurs. It has to be at some distance from expectations. The more unexpected the success of such a venture, the smaller the number of competitors, and the more successful the entrepreneur who implements the idea. The same applies to the shoe and the book businesses - or any kind of entrepreneurship. The same applies to scientific theories - nobody has interest in listening to trivialities. The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

Consider the Pacific tsunami of December 2004. Had it been expected, it would not have caused the damage it did - the areas affected would have been less populated, an early warning system would have been put in place. What you know cannot really hurt you.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb