cdierkes

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I have some excellent news.  As of today, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen drops.  With a vengeance sucka.  Hats off to Scott Payne for coming up with the idea and ED Kain for doing the yeoman’s work on setting up the site.  The Bowler logo is Freddie’s doing.
Link Here
Website (for Bookmarking) http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/
From our About Page:
The League of Ordinary Gentlemen is a group blog that hopes to bring a new style and sensibility to blogging. The contributing writers hail from various points along the political spectrum, but all hold a deep and abiding commitment to the exploration of ideas outside the foray of rhetorical and ideological cul de sacs. The entries are less posts than they are dialogues with an aim towards sustained discussion on topics and issues that lay at the foundations of our lives. This approach, we hope, will provide readers with a thoughtful and searching alternative analysis.
On my side, I’m very excited and intrigued by this possibility of seeking a new praxis/way of group blogging.  When I started out this blog it was originally subtitled Integral Philosophy, Politics, and Christianity.  My Christianity blogging has migrated over to Credo @ Culture11.  My politics blogging will as of today be heading over to The League.  And this site will remain for Integral philosophy.
Our theme song (since there are Seven of us):

Tagged: League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Mind blowing preacher.  Warren was trying; Lowery was just doing.
Tagged: Joseph Lowery

(Hat tip to Stuart Davis for turning me on to this one–I will be doing my best to evangelize to make this the next great internet sensation)….
As a commenter godslittle soldier says in the Youtube thread:  “Mark Gormley you are a rock god with my father’s fashion sense.” Well said sir.  That should go in for comment of the year.
To quote Jack Black in Kung Fu Panda:  “There is no charge for awesomeness.”

Tagged: Mark Gormley

Everyone should must watch this short 30 minute clip on the Financial Crisis and the necessity for absolutely radical change.  The talk is a PopTech gtalk given by Juan Enriquez, whose spent most of his life studying similar crises around the world (particularly in Latin America).
His 5 Stages of Meltdown are:
1. Denial (Greenspan, W. Bush)
2. Borrow, Spend, Borrow More (Stimulus Packages)
3. Go Broke
4. Brutal Readjustment
5. Rebuild
The US and much of the world is at step 2. Question: When the whole industrialized world goes broke simultaneously who foots the bill? Who does the restructuring? Where does that money come from?
Without a massive change–i.e. massive cuts in defense and entitlement spending, caps in health care spending, raised taxes–the US appears headed to become Mexico (or perhaps Brazil) in about t-minus 6-10 years.  If the dollar loses its value (with 70% of debt owned by foreign entities) then there will be a global run on shorting the dollar and that’s all she wrote folks.
The Democrats are increasingly beholden to Keynesian economics, which assumes the problem is on the demand side.  Whatever is left of the Republican party thinks its Fannie Mae and some temporary credit crisis and a nice chance to apply some shock-therapy disaster capitalism (say to the Auto Unions).  I’m less than a true believer in the Obama stimulus (or the Krugman retort that it is too tax cut heavy and not enough infrastructure buildup).  Both are just variations on how best to do the Keynesian thing.  [Friedman monetary policy has failed and I think Keynesian will as well].
The right-after-the-immediacy of the credit/demand problem-is-over horizon is a solvency crisis.  It is a debt crisis–a crisis of the fundamental way of doing economic business.  That we have to be more like our grandparents (my grandparents I should say), who actually built things and saved money.  No get rich quick schemes.  As Enriquez says the stimulus at best is a tornique

You know the Global Age of the 21st century has arrived when you see this video.  There are no words to describe how genius this is.  Warning:  Some raunchy lyrics.  If I ever met the person(s) who made this, I would buy him/her a beer.

I don’t have much to say on the tragedy that is transpiring over in Israel/Gaza.
Only to say that it yet again proves the veracity of Martin Van Creveld’s thesis that since the nuclear age, since the end of WWII, big powers over time always lose against irregular, smaller, guerrillas groups.  e.g. The French in Indochina & Algeria; The British is Aden, Suez; The Americans in Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan; The Soviets in Afghanistan.  On and on the list goes.
The only LICs (Low-Intensity Conflicts) that are won by the big powers are when they are within their own country (The British in N.Ireland, NATO in Balkans?).  But counterinsurgencies in another country (e.g. Syria trying to police/control Lebanon) eventually wear out.  With the Israeli/Palestinian situation the question is:  is this a counterinsurgency of national liberation or an uprising within a country.  The schizoid nature of the conflict suggests a bit of both which is why it continues to both flare up repeatedly and yet can not force a withdraw from the Israelis (except to the pre-67 borders).
For those who don’t know Creveld, basically he argues that big powers (including Israel) build their armies for conventional state-state war, which is what they never fight.  They get themselves and their mammoth energy-hungry beasts of armies into rugged terrain, urban warfare (see US in Iraq), get their supply lines cut (see Taliban attacks on NATO convoys through Pakistan), and eventually are forced to withdraw.
If Israel sends in tanks to Gaza expect it turn very badly for the Israelis.  They will undoubtedly kill many more Palestinians.  Hamas can not beat the IDF in a straight-up fight which is why they won’t take them on that way.
Here is Creveld predicting/explaining a very bleak future for Israel indeed (from 2002):
Byrne: Thanks for joining us tonight on Foreign Correspondent. How has it come to this, Martin… how is it that the mighty Israeli army – one of the world’s mo

Tagged: Rick Mercer

Again, listen when he talks about credit, he means faith.  The system is collapsing as the existentialists would say because of bad faith.  Literally.

On days like this it’s good to know I don’t live in the US (???):
A federal appeals court in Manhattan upheld the convictions on Monday of three Al Qaeda operatives in a ruling that bolsters the government’s power to investigate terrorism by holding that a key Constitutional protection afforded to Americans does not apply overseas.
The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit holds for the first time that government agents may obtain admiss

I just watched most of this whole discussion (which you can find on Fora, here) as background for a paper I’m doing on process theology and economics.
If you can get beyond the sincere though smug circle-jerking lefty-ism of the thing, they do raise some interesting points.  That might be a little harsh, so let me balance that by saying I have read at least one if not more of the works of all of the panelists.  And learned a good deal from all of them.
But there’s a really weird moment in the whole co

Our media is so poor, so dumb, so ignorant, so insanely out of it, that they make Bill Ayers look like the sane guy in the room. Jebus.
Now if you watch this thing it’s clear that Ayers is still a radical, a Boomer radical, i.e. a tenured professor radical who isn’t really getting his hands dirty or is that hardcore nowadays. He’s pretty pathetic in my mind.  He only sees the evil of the Vietnam War but not of the Weathermen.  That’s straight up crazy and disgusting in my view, but he’s up front

If the pro-Romney faction of the McCain campaign is the one leaking (or making up?) the anti-Palin stories, which is quite possible, it may take down Palin, if she hasn’t taken herself out already (which I tend to think), it will be all for naught because Mitt Romney is not going to be president of the United States.
UNLESS.…and this is a huge unless.  Unless the economic situation turns depressionary and holds throughout Obama’s entire term and he totally f’s up.  Then Romney could run as Mr. Fix

The whole speech here.
And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world – our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.  To those who would tear this world down – we will defeat you.  To those who seek peace and security – we support you.  And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright – tonight

The fight song in honor of my state putting Obama (essentially) to victory.

A man acquainted with sorrow:
Barack Obama’s grandmother, whose personality and bearing shaped much of the life of the Democratic presidential contender, has died, Obama announced Monday, 1 day before the election. Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86. Obama announced the news from the campaign trail in Charlotte, N.C. The joint statement with his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng said Dunham died peacefully late Sunday night after a battle with cancer.
She dies less than 24 hours before he will be the first African American

I read Working when in high school and it remains to this day one of my all time favorite works.  He was in a class by himself.  The trust people had in him and the depth they would share, that he could help invoke was unmatched.  Through the ordinariness of life, the more than ordinary emerged in his presence.  He was the Shaman of 20th century America.
Below is a video from his beloved Chicago’s own Elmore James, evoking the great history that marvelous city gave us in the form of the electrified bl

Just saw Howard Finemann on Countdown and he discussed how Obama is bidding to change the structural way in which political campaigning/organizing is done and he listed the history from Andrew Jackson through FDR and then Reagan to today.
The thing Finemann discussed was that Obama volunteers go person to person and do not have to (as he said) route back through the central office.  Each has a great degree of autonomy.  Obama in other words is applying open-source methodolgy to US political campaiging. 

Sneak peak of documentary here:

The full video is available from the Frontline Website.  A must watch in my book.  Interesting to note that many of the experts on the interviews are made up of the new left/center-left security outfits (e.g. CNAS) who are going to make up a lot of the mid level positions in an Obama administration.  Also a bunch of COIN guys (Nagl, Kilcullen).
There is so much to comment on, but the section (towards the middle) on Pakistan is the key portion in my book.  The prior colon