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Thread: Evidence We're in a Third--or Fourth--Turning - Page 433







Post#10801 at 04-08-2006 05:35 PM by Andy '85 [at Texas joined Aug 2003 #posts 1,465]
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Quote Originally Posted by Zarathustra
I'm confused about the use of "propatainment". You see V as propaganda?

Also, how was the movie of polluted creation?
If taken the wrong way, any form of media can become propaganda. It's a flexible thing that can ecompass anything. You've seen this argument many times when two opposing groups deride eachother's proofs and sources as "propaganda" and not "truth".

So any medium with a message can become propaganda if wielded in such a manner. So far V hasn't been widespreadly used as such, but the advertisement with their slogans is one hint at what it could become.

As for the film, it was decent. Really, I only came for the destruction. What underlying themes that were running in the film felt like moral bludgeoning and compared to what I have read from the novel/comics, the movie has Hollywood-ized the story dramatically, even though it was at least faithful in interpretation (other than the 40 year retcon to accomodate to our timeline). I'm much more at home with disaster flicks where you can suspend your disbelief and just enjoy the mayhem. Unfortunately, even those films try to substantiate themselves with unecessary plot. So I usually turn to science shows on television to get my fix of excitement. All forces of nature, all the time, no fluff or sappy stories.

And congratulations for the 10,000th thread post Sean! You should celebrate the longetivity of this thread.
Right-Wing liberal, slow progressive, and other contradictions straddling both the past and future, but out of touch with the present . . .

"We also know there are known unknowns.
That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know." - Donald Rumsfeld







Post#10802 at 04-10-2006 05:56 PM by Virgil K. Saari [at '49er, north of the Mesabi Mountains joined Jun 2001 #posts 7,835]
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What's Italian for Diebold?

Dieboldini


Florida :arrow: Ohio :arrow: Italia :lol:







Post#10803 at 04-10-2006 06:14 PM by Uzi [at joined Oct 2005 #posts 2,254]
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- -







Post#10804 at 04-10-2006 06:58 PM by Andy '85 [at Texas joined Aug 2003 #posts 1,465]
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Quote Originally Posted by Mary Fitzmas
And in other news, Finnish disco.
Geez, evens the Finns can make disco dismal and depressing.

Besides, I'm more partial to Dschinghis Khan anyway. Gotta love Cossack dancing.
Right-Wing liberal, slow progressive, and other contradictions straddling both the past and future, but out of touch with the present . . .

"We also know there are known unknowns.
That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know." - Donald Rumsfeld







Post#10805 at 04-12-2006 01:10 AM by Zarathustra [at Where the Northwest meets the Southwest joined Mar 2003 #posts 9,198]
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Quote Originally Posted by Andy '85
Quote Originally Posted by Zarathustra
I'm confused about the use of "propatainment". You see V as propaganda?

Also, how was the movie of polluted creation?
If taken the wrong way, any form of media can become propaganda. It's a flexible thing that can ecompass anything. You've seen this argument many times when two opposing groups deride each other's proofs and sources as "propaganda" and not "truth".
Yes. Though I am open to the idea that often "truths" are interpretations of worldviews. But sometimes there is actual truth even in propaganda ("the Soviets invaded Hungary") against which the opposing propaganda is disingenuous. Also, sometimes particular worldviews are highly dysfunctional in certain contexts. Take cargo cults for instance. I'll bite my tongue on giving other examples.

Quote Originally Posted by Andy '85
So any medium with a message can become propaganda if wielded in such a manner. So far V hasn't been widespreadly used as such, but the advertisement with their slogans is one hint at what it could become.
I am surprised more has not been made from it.

Quote Originally Posted by Andy '85
As for the film, it was decent. Really, I only came for the destruction. What underlying themes that were running in the film felt like moral bludgeoning and compared to what I have read from the novel/comics, the movie has Hollywood-ized the story dramatically, even though it was at least faithful in interpretation (other than the 40 year retcon to accomodate to our timeline). I'm much more at home with disaster flicks where you can suspend your disbelief and just enjoy the mayhem. Unfortunately, even those films try to substantiate themselves with unecessary plot. So I usually turn to science shows on television to get my fix of excitement. All forces of nature, all the time, no fluff or sappy stories.
I know nothing of the written version so I didn't have any expectations. Personally I was very impressed. Lots of messages. Lots of levels. And I only noticed one inconsistency: John Hurt's teeth were crooked and stained when he was on the big screen, but were white and straight in that episode in the underground. I've seen it twice and that bugged me.

Indeed, I have been inspired to write my own version of the "Remember, Remember" poem. I took a short one someone else made and ran with it:

Remember, remember
The Eleventh of September
The neocons, malfeasance, and plot
I see no reason
Why Bush and his treason
Should ever be forgot

George W., George W.
'Twas his intent
To move Big Oil into the Establishment
So Iraq he invades
Whilst Osama evades
But God's name he invokes
And during Katrina he jokes
Holloa boys, holloa boys, America's needs his resignation
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God please save the Nation!
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip horrah!

A daisy cutter for the great sheik
A ten kiloton nuke to smote him
His head on a stake would also do
Once his entrails are brought before him
Burn Bin Laden in a tub of hot, bubbling tar
Burn him with the traitors in Washington afar
Burn them all for the evil they've made
Then we'll say: The great treason is paid




Can you tell I'm ticked about how we've handled 9/11? :wink:

Quote Originally Posted by Andy '85
And congratulations for the 10,000th thread post Sean! You should celebrate the longetivity of this thread.
We all should!
Americans have had enough of glitz and roar . . Foreboding has deepened, and spiritual currents have darkened . . .
THE FOURTH TURNING IS AT HAND.
See T4T, p. 253.







Post#10806 at 04-13-2006 04:26 PM by KaiserD2 [at David Kaiser '47 joined Jul 2001 #posts 5,220]
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Third Turning City

From 1929-32, Hoover essentially insisted there was nothing he could do. This is different--it's Christamas for every business interest/lobbying firm in Washington. And the Democrats don't seem to care.

non-commerial use only:

Molly Ivins: The Daily Drip of Special Favors for Special Interests

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Posted on Apr. 10, 2006

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN, Texas—We need to keep up with the daily drip, that endless succession of special favors for special interests performed by Congress, or we’ll never figure out how we got so far behind the eight ball. While the top Bushies lunge about test-driving new wars (great idea—the one we’re having is a bummer, so let’s start another!), Congress just keeps right on cranking out those corporate goodies.

Earlier this month, the House effectively repealed more than 200 state food safety and public health protections. Say, when was the last time you enjoyed a little touch of food poisoning? Coming soon to a stomach near you. What was really impressive about HR 4167, the “National Uniformity for Food Act,” is that it was passed without a public hearing.

“The House is trampling crucial health safeguards in every state without so much as a single public hearing,” said Erik Olson, attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This just proves the old adage, ‘Money talks.’ The food industry spared no expense to ensure passage.”

Thirty-nine attorneys general, plus health, consumer and environmental groups, are opposing the law. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the food industry has spent more than $81 million on campaign contributions to members of Congress since 2000.

The bill would automatically override any state measure that is stronger than federal law, the opposite of what a sensible law would do. The NRDC says state laws protecting consumers from chemical additives, bacteria and ingredients that can trigger allergic reactions would be barred, and that includes alerts about chemical contamination in fish, health protection standards for milk and eggs, and warnings about chemicals or toxins such as arsenic, mercury and lead. Happy eating, all.

Here’s another little gem, one of those “it was after midnight and everyone wanted to go home” deals. Just a no-cost sweetener to encourage oil and gas companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico—and who needs more encouragement these days than the oil companies? The poor things are making hardly any money at all. Just have the federal government waive the royalty rights for drilling in the publicly owned waters. Turns out this waiver will cost the government at least $7 billion over the next five years.

I roared with laughter upon reading that Texas Rep. Joe Barton had assured his colleagues the provision of the energy bill was “so non-controversial” that senior House and Senate negotiators had not even discussed it. That’s one of the oldest ploys in the Texas handbook of sneaky tricks and has been successfully used to pass many a sweet deal for the oil industry.

“The big lie about this whole program is that it doesn’t cost anything,” Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey told The New York Times. “Taxpayers are being asked to provide huge subsidies to oil companies to produce oil—it’s like subsidizing a fish to swim.”

Then there are daily drips so strange it’s hard to tell if members of Congress are clear on what they’re doing. You may have heard that more and more corporations are backing out of their pension obligations and dumping the responsibility on an under-funded federal agency.

So the push is on to get companies to pony up for the pension agency. According to the Financial Times: “Employers will be able to slash their contributions to under-funded pension schemes by tens of billions of dollars over the next five years under proposed legislation before Congress that was expected to have the opposite effect. The legislation was proposed by the White House last year to lessen the risk of a taxpayer bailout of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., a federal safety net for pension schemes.”

Brilliant. Anyone know how the White House went from protecting the Benefit Guaranty Corp. to slashing corporate contributions by tens of billions? Did they send Michael “Brownie” Brown to do the job?







Post#10807 at 04-17-2006 01:14 AM by Mr. Reed [at Intersection of History joined Jun 2001 #posts 4,376]
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Here is a piece by Pat Buchanan nearly one year ago.

Upheaval Ahead
by Patrick J. Buchanan
June 20, 2005

Who is the Gene McCarthy of this generation?

For those too young to recall, in late 1967, Gen. Westmoreland came home to ask LBJ for 200,000 more troops for Vietnam, in addition to the 500,000 already committed. LBJ told him no.

Vietnam was the issue of the day. And as no other Democrat dared challenge Johnson in the primaries of 1968, Sen. McCarthy bravely went into New Hampshire and declared against him.

He carried 41 percent to LBJ's 49 percent. Johnson's name, however, was not on the New Hampshire ballot – he was a write-in candidate – and perhaps half of McCarthy's vote came from Granite State hawks who wanted the United States to unleash its power and win the war.

But in politics, perception is all. Gene McCarthy broke Johnson's presidency and converted the antiwar movement into a mass political movement. Four days after New Hampshire, Robert Kennedy leapt into the race. Two weeks later, Johnson announced he would not run.

Nixon's victory in 1968, over a divided Democratic Party, became, with 1932, one of the two seminal elections of the 20th century.

Prediction: A Eugene McCarthy will appear soon to pressure and challenge Hillary Clinton in 2008, if Hillary does not convert herself into an antiwar candidate.

For politics abhors a vacuum. And with U.S. casualties now running at the rate they did before the January elections and polls showing that three in five Americans think the war a mistake and we should start bringing the troops home, some Democrat is certain to try to give voice to this majority and ride it into the White House.

Will a peace candidate be elected? Probably not. None ever has in wartime. But it seems certain the Democratic Party will be as divided on Iraq in 2008 as it was on Vietnam in 1968.

Why has no national antiwar Democrat emerged since Howard Dean's campaign collapsed in Iowa, one who could be a serious candidate for the nomination in 2008?

Because serious Democrats know that antiwar candidates are rarely nominated and never win. Even the venerable Sam Nunn of Georgia was finished after he opposed the Gulf War in 1991. This is likely a reason why skeptics of the Iraq war – like Clinton, Kerry, Daschle, and Edwards – all voted for war.

They are all now locked in as war hawks on Iraq. The only defense they can make for that vote today to their antiwar party is to argue that Bush misled them and mismanaged the war.

But that raises counter-questions.

Why did these senators give Bush a blank check to go to war? Why did they fail in their duty as custodians of the congressional war powers by not demanding Bush prove Saddam had ties to 9/11 and an arsenal of WMD he planned to use? Why did they not ask in advance how the Bush administration planned to pacify and democratize Iraq? Why did they not demand to known how long pacification would take and what the cost might be in lives and treasure?

Why did they not say: Mr. President, you must make a better case for war – before we authorize war?

The pro-war Democrats thus have a grave dilemma to confront.

As John Kerry demonstrated with his agonized performance in 2004 – trying to rally antiwar Democrats while maintaining his war hawk credentials – a Democrat who voted for war, only to turn against it, risks being ridiculed as a cut-and-run liberal. And that is usually fatal.

There is a second reason no potential Democratic nominee has yet demanded that Bush start bringing the troops home now. Democrats fear the peacenik label. For they believe this label, pinned on them by Nixon-Reagan-Bush Republicans, froze them out of the White House for 20 of the 24 years from 1968 to 1992. And they are right.

Yet the antiwar constituency has now grown to where it can sustain, and will demand, a national candidate to carry its case to the country.

What about a Republican antiwar candidate in 2008?

There may well be one, but how such a candidate can be nominated by a party that will be forever associated with the Iraq war is impossible to see. Like it or not, as the Mexican War is known as "Jimmy Polk's War," the Iraq war is going to be known as "George Bush's War."

No matter how badly things have gone in Iraq by 2008, how can the GOP nominate a candidate who has run against the cause that defined the presidency of George W. Bush?

As the Bush poll numbers fall and the Iraq war returns front-and-center to politics, the divisions in this country over whether to stay the course; escalate, as the prospect of failure is intolerable to the nation; or begin to withdraw and take the consequences will reappear and deepen.

A politics of war, a politics of upheaval, lie just ahead.
"The urge to dream, and the will to enable it is fundamental to being human and have coincided with what it is to be American." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
intp '82er







Post#10808 at 04-17-2006 10:40 AM by antichrist [at I'm in the Big City now, boy! joined Sep 2003 #posts 1,655]
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Ouch Kaiser, that article hurts.

Constitutional republic my ass.







Post#10809 at 04-17-2006 11:20 AM by Mr. Reed [at Intersection of History joined Jun 2001 #posts 4,376]
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For Discussion Purposes Only

Impoliteness may be on the way out.

New York Leads Politeness Trend? Get Outta Here!
By WINNIE HU
April 16, 2006

New Yorkers are known to throw things onto the field at Yankee Stadium when the Red Sox are in town. At times they boo their own mayor at parades. Some refuse to surrender their seats to pregnant women on the subway, while others cut in line and never apologize.

But somehow a city whose residents have long been scorned for their churlish behavior is now being praised for adopting rules and laws that govern personal conduct, making New York an unlikely model for legislating courtesy and decorum.

From tighter restrictions on sports fans and car alarms to a new $50 fine on subway riders who rest their feet on a seat, New York's efforts to curb everyday annoyances and foster more civility among its residents have increasingly been studied and debated far from home.

When Chicago's aldermen wanted to keep rowdy fans from descending upon Wrigley Field, they looked to New York, which has arrested 11 people at Yankee and Shea Stadiums under a 2004 law that makes it illegal to interfere with professional sports events.

When Boston and San Francisco lawmakers considered silencing cellphones in their movie theaters and playhouses, they, too, looked to New York, which imposed a $50 fine in 2003 on callers who brazenly dial up during movies, concerts and Broadway shows. And when community groups from Toronto to Washington looked for new ways to fight graffiti, they turned to New York, which passed a law in January that makes building owners responsible, for the first time, for cleaning up after the vandals.

With its precipitous drops in crime, New York has increasingly been able to turn its attention to policing offensive behavior, from the mere faux pas to outright misconduct that puts others at risk. And that has put it on the front line of a national crackdown on incivility.

"There's no excuse for that kind of thing," said Alderman Edward M. Burke, a leader of the Chicago City Council, who has introduced a sports fan law based on New York's. "I think it's a good idea to remind the general public of what is expected of them."

Letitia Baldrige, the White House social secretary during the Kennedy years, could not agree more. Ms. Baldrige, a former New Yorker, has heard more than her share of bellyaching over other people's rudeness.

"Most people just seem to ignore common sense and common courtesy so it does have to be legislated," she said. "To have this happen in New York is going to inspire a lot of other people. I cannot applaud it enough. My hands are tired from clapping."

The city has made sputtering attempts in the past to coax civility out of its residents. During the 2004 Republican convention, it gave protesters buttons saying "peaceful political activists." But nearly 1,800 were arrested that week. The famed Gray's Papaya hot dog chain tries a similar tack, selling "Polite New Yorker" buttons for $1. About 60 are sold a week, but most go to tourists who think they are a joke, says the owner, Nicholas Gray.

"I try to do my part," said Mr. Gray, who requires his employees to wear the button on their uniform even though he does not. "I'm not always that polite. I'm just another New Yorker."

And throughout New York's history, its political leaders have sought to restore order to the chaotic streetscape and fine-tune urban life. Fiorello H. La Guardia once banned street performances involving monkeys. Decades later, Rudolph W. Giuliani's campaign against squeegee men came to embody his philosophy that fighting crime began with the smaller, quality-of-life offenses.

But sometimes, the city's attempts to enforce the laws illuminated its hard-nosed nature: Mayor Edward I. Koch's favorite parking sign warned motorists: "Don't Even THINK of Parking Here."

Under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the city has increasingly focused on social policies that were once thought to be beyond the realm of government. Mr. Bloomberg was largely responsible for the city's smoking ban, overcoming opposition from the tobacco companies and their lobbyists to clear bars, restaurants and nightclubs of a potential health hazard as well as inconsiderate smokers.

The mayor also overhauled the city's noise code for the first time in three decades, taking aim at loud nightclubs, barking dogs and even that staple of summer, the Mister Softee jingle, all in the interests of keeping the neighborhood peace.

Given the successes, some New York officials are moving to take things even further. Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., of Queens, got the Council to expand his sports fan law last fall to include penalties for those who throw things onto the field or spit at the players. The 11 people who have been arrested under the original law, all during Yankees and Mets games, include one man who was sentenced to nine weekends in jail, fined $2,000, and ordered to stay out of Shea Stadium for three years.

This month, Mr. Vallone, the chairman of the Council's Public Safety Committee, introduced another measure that he calls a lesson in Parenting 101: Children under the age of 10 would not be allowed in movie theaters after 10 p.m., to safeguard both the welfare of the children and the enjoyment of the other moviegoers.

It is not the first time that the city has tried to teach children — and their parents — how to behave in public. Under a code of conduct mandated by the Council since 2003, parents can be ejected from Little League games for unsportsmanlike behavior and allowed to return only after taking an anger-management class.

"There's nothing that makes you want to crawl under the bleachers faster than some parent screaming at a kid — even their own kid — in an abusive manner," said Councilman Lewis A. Fidler, of Brooklyn, who sponsored that law.

The crackdowns have left others wondering if the metropolis once known as Fun City is fun no more.

"It sounds like your City Council is getting really uptight," said Aaron Peskin, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who, along with his colleagues, has nevertheless looked to New York's laws for guidance. "It all seems a little overwrought."

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, has not yet raised objections to these laws. But she cautioned that lawmakers could interfere with privacy rights or impose censorship when they, say, imposed a movie curfew on young children. "Legislation to set bedtime for Bonzo, or to interfere with how late parents can keep their child out at night, is a violation of privacy," she said.

Still, many New Yorkers say that the city is becoming a more civil place. The sports fan law, for one, is praised by Paul Lo Duca and other Mets players during a pregame video shown at Shea Stadium.

In the past, rowdy fans were simply escorted out of the stadium and released, which was "akin to a traffic summons," but now that they are faced with jail time, they think twice about misbehaving, said Robert J. Kasdon, the Mets' vice president of security. "It's the most effective law of its kind," he said. "Baseball is a family event, and this law helps us maintain that atmosphere."

Not all the city's laws have been as effective. For example, the ban on cellphones in movie theaters does not appear to ever have been enforced by the police. Some Council members and movie theater managers, though, contend that just having the law is enough in most cases to persuade moviegoers to turn off their phones.

But Peter Post, the director of the Emily Post Institute, which instructs schools, businesses and government organizations on etiquette, said that law or no law, good behavior could not simply be forced on unwilling people. Instead, he suggested that New York invest in a public relations campaign that reflected the sentiments of its residents.

"I think we've reached a tipping point with rudeness," he said. "Instead of people quietly putting up with rude behavior, they're finally saying, 'I don't have to put up with that anymore.' "
"The urge to dream, and the will to enable it is fundamental to being human and have coincided with what it is to be American." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson
intp '82er







Post#10810 at 04-20-2006 08:38 AM by The Wonkette [at Arlington, VA 1956 joined Jul 2002 #posts 9,209]
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Doom Boom

This article, from last Sunday's Washington Post magazine, supports Mike Alexander's theory that We Be 4T. The article is long, but I'm printing it in it's entireity, so that people don't have to register at washingtonpost.com in order to read it. Standard disclaimers apply.

BTW, even if you don't necessarily agree that We Be 4T, it's still a fascinating read.

Rallying 'Round the Flag
Since al-Qaeda declared war on Washington five years ago, the federal city has responded the way it knows best

By David Von Drehle
Sunday, April 9, 2006; W10

Late one winter afternoon, not long before he stepped down as chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, Terrance Gainer was discussing security in the age of catastrophic terrorism. Behind him, his office windows displayed a spectacular view: nearly 180 degrees of Washington skyline, anchored by a huge, incandescently white dome. To some people, the Capitol dome stands for power. To others, freedom. To the Americans who watched as the dome was built during the desperate years of the Civil War, its alabaster gleam represented the idea of the nation itself.

Gainer would see the dome and think: "Quite a target."

And the Mall, with its monuments, memorials, artifacts and treasures? "It's like a runway," Gainer observed. Macabre? Perhaps, but Gainer, like many others in Washington, was paid to think unpleasant thoughts, including one in which a terrorist steers a jet down the wide landing path of the Mall, descending over the Reflecting Pool, accelerating above the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian Castle on his right, the National Gallery on his left, to slam spectacularly into the dome.

The White House, with its low profile and wooded surroundings, is a much trickier objective, Gainer noted.

This was all said matter-of-factly. It's just the world we live in today. See plane, think missile; see landmark, think fireball; feel breeze, think anthrax. And so I found myself nodding agreeably as Gainer continued in this apocalyptic vein, comparing the relative threats posed by deadly germs in the air vents, a dirty bomb, a suicide bomber in a room full of VIPs. He spoke smilingly about the inevitable panic, the gridlocked roads, the trapped humans frantic to escape. Is evacuation even a good idea in most cases? Gainer asked rhetorically. After all, a basement makes a sturdy bunker against even a violent blast. On the other hand, if the basement fills with highly flammable jet fuel . . .

"And what if a bomb the size of the Hiroshima bomb was set off around here?" Gainer asked finally, then answered his own question. "Well, we'd all be dead, so we wouldn't have to worry about a mass evacuation."

For a brief moment, I imagined a blinding flash outside Gainer's windows, and a rush of superheated wind, and the windows bursting as the walls imploded. But just as quickly, the vision retreated to the grim corner of the brain where most Washingtonians endeavor to keep it. In place of the horror there was, once more, a fine view of the coppery winter dusk. The dome. A construction crane. Lights winking on. Another construction crane. The Washington Monument. Another construction crane.

And another construction crane.

And another.

Construction cranes occupied nearly every point of the compass, in the foreground and in the background, looming nearby, tiny on the horizon. Bombs and missiles aren't the only things that go boom. Economies do, too.

Thus, the yin and yang of life in Washington were balanced there amid the homey confines of Chief Gainer's office. Visions of disaster alongside hard evidence of good times. The fact is, since the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, life has been fat here in the cross hairs (apart from the occasional night sweat). The Washington area has enjoyed the best economy in the nation during the past four years -- by a mile. What doesn't kill us makes us richer.

Perhaps, if you live here, you have found yourself wondering whether you should stay. Maybe the thought crossed your mind the day the folks from Human Resources distributed plastic escape hoods, mini-flashlights and whistles to blow should you find yourself pinned under rubble. Or maybe it was the day your spouse came home with an armload of duct tape and plastic sheeting for your "safe room." Maybe it was when the guys in the mailroom started walking around in surgical masks, or when you attended that dinner party where your neighbors explained their strategy for evacuating via bicycle or canoe. But you stayed, and seemingly everyone else did, too. And many thousands more poured into the region, filling the subdivisions and condo blocks and office towers rising from Dulles to downtown, Leesburg to Largo, Dale City to Hyattsville.

Meanwhile, this thriving metropolis has been forested with strange, man-made flora: the hardened posts, known as bollards, cemented into the ground at strategic points to thwart car bombs; the slender poles blossoming with surveillance cameras; the stumpy boxes that give no outward sign of the radiation detectors inside. Above it all, like a forest canopy, rise the busy booms (that word again!) of the construction cranes. The stubby bollard and the towering crane, one representing fear, the other prosperity -- incongruous, yes, but also ubiquitous. They are the symbols of our time.

THE FIRST REACTIONS TO 9/11 included panic, disbelief, outrage, shock, sorrow, fury and a righteous patriotism. There was a lot of speculation about crowds at the military recruiting stations and a general wave of bear-any-burden determination. It was a blood, sweat, toil and tears sort of moment. President Bush, congressional leaders and Pentagon brass gathered at the National Cathedral a few days after the attacks to pray for God's assistance in the smiting of our enemies. As they stood to leave, the pipe organ roared out "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" -- which, you may remember, is not exactly a pastoral. Some fateful lightning was about to be loosed from our terrible, swift sword.

And indeed there has been lightning in distant places around the world. Closer to home, however, the response has been less martial than monetary. Military recruitment is down, not up. Rather than meet any hardship, we have loosed the fateful charge cards of America's fat wallet.

Which makes a certain brand of sense: A basic doctrine of war says to mass your strength against your enemy's weakness, and the United States has no more tangible, flexible strength than its economy. It's no coincidence that, among the five living former secretaries of defense since 1977, four have become financiers (the other is vice president). Our money and our muscle are strategically meshed. Experts can argue about the long-term vitality of America's money muscle, given our outsourced jobs, sagging industrial base, looming old-age crisis and national debt. But for the time being, U.S. cash flow remains awesome. The federal government is the world's largest consumer of goods and services. The United States produces more buying power each year than the 25 European Union nations combined, though Europe has 160 million more people. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, we produce more than 20 percent of the world's dough. Faced with a crisis, our leaders did what they know best. They started shoveling money.

It's impossible to say precisely how much the U.S. government has spent in response to 9/11. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States -- better known as the 9/11 Commission -- noted in 2004 that the country's defense and security spending was escalating more steeply than at any time in the past 50 years. This money is contained in thousands of budget items, some of which are misleading, others of which are classified. We can see the tips of some icebergs, though. According to the Congressional Budget Office, funding specifically for homeland security, one small part of the overall security spending spree, more than doubled in the first two years after the attacks, from $20 billion to more than $40 billion. Some federal spending is an obvious response to Osama bin Laden, such as the billions to fortify federal office buildings and update government computer networks. Some comes under less obvious headings, such as the billions in new spending at military hospitals to treat and rehabilitate the wounded soldiers of the Iraq war. Some money remains inside government agencies, such as the billions in new spending at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, funding research into anthrax, smallpox and other germ terrorism. Some of it pours into private companies, especially private companies with big Washington area offices. All told, it's safe to say that hundreds of billions have gushed forth in a torrent of money that has washed across the globe, puddling in pockets from Kandahar to Kansas City. And the great lakes of cash have collected right here in the government's back yard.

"What you see in all the new construction, all the new jobs and so forth, is the benefit the Washington area receives from having a very rich uncle -- you know, Uncle Sam," says Stephen Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. "Every quarter, and especially on April 15, we receive an enormous transfer of wealth from the rest of the country."

Fuller is a slim, graying fellow who has built a small empire on his diligent collection and smooth explication of Washington area economic data. He has numbers for everything, usually right at his fingertips, from the size of the federal workforce under Lyndon Johnson to the current growth rate of the dry-cleaning sector. Merchants, developers, politicians and journalists look to Fuller and his PowerPoint slides for illumination of the world outside their windows. Suppose you want to know why the unemployment rate in Northern Virginia has been the lowest in the country for much of the past four years. Fuller has a slide to explain it.

"Government procurement," he summarizes.

Fuller continues. "In Fairfax County, federal procurement amounted to $16 billion last year alone." That is the richest windfall in America, by far -- roughly 10 times as much, per capita, as the government doled out for goods and services in Los Angeles, for example. "Procurement" does not describe all government spending, just the goods the government buys and the outside work it commissions. So that $16 billion, while huge, doesn't include the salaries of government workers, who are legion in Fairfax and throughout the Washington region. Nor does it include the rent the government pays for office space, even though the feds and their contractors are this area's biggest tenants, by far. Since 9/11, the Washington region has boasted the strongest commercial real estate market in America, with low vacancy rates producing rents second only to New York City.

All these spending streams flow into the region, but procurement spending "is something far more potent," Fuller says. "We've found that procurement dollars have twice as much impact in the economy as government payroll dollars. The money churns more through the economy. There's a bigger bang for the buck."

That bang is reflected in the huge new houses with the two-story foyers, in the fancy late-model cars, in the oversubscribed private schools, and, most of all, in the chain of construction cranes sited in the past few years from the Pentagon to past Dulles International Airport. In terms perfectly chosen for the prosperous citizens of Northern Virginia, Fuller compares this stretch to a high-class galleria, with the Defense Department and the airport as the anchor stores. "The Pentagon is like Neiman Marcus," he says, "and Dulles is like Nordstrom." Between them lies a long line of upscale boutiques doing record business -- weapons contractors, management consultants, data processing giants, communications providers, information technology firms. Big names, such as Accenture, BearingPoint, Computer Sciences Corp., General Dynamics, Titan, Oracle, Raytheon and SAIC. Countless smaller contractors as well. These companies are selling everything from missiles to disaster-modeling software to computer integration at the Department of Homeland Security.

Northern Virginia has prospered the most, but don't cry for Maryland or the District. According to another of Fuller's slides, federal procurement spending has been frenzied there, too. From 2003 to 2004, to focus on a single year, federal contracting increased 16 percent in the District and 19 percent in the Maryland suburbs.

If you spend it, they will come: Since al-Qaeda hit the Pentagon, more people have moved to greater Washington than to any other non-Sunbelt region. Call it denial, call it playing the odds; having weighed the certainty of good jobs versus the threat of future catastrophe, people have voted with their moving vans. The threat is real. Last year, Rand Corp., the granddaddy of national security think tanks, proposed a complex formula for estimating the risk of major terrorist attacks in U.S. cities. The cities with the most dense urban cores, New York and Chicago, ranked first and second because of the prospect of many deaths in a relatively small area. Washington, despite much lower density, was third, because of its obvious strategic importance.

That's enough risk to inspire the bollards and cameras and radiation detectors, but not enough to persuade people to leave. If you want perfect safety, you could buy a government-surplus missile silo in sparsely populated Kansas or Wyoming. They come on the market from time to time. Once you seal the hatch on an Atlas E silo, encased in 18 inches of steel-reinforced concrete beneath at least six feet of prairie sod, you can ride out a nuke more than 50 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb. But the silo market is slumping, while two-bedroom condos in Kalorama, within walking distance of prime al-Qaeda targets, are going for $750,000 and up.

Government procurement was rising even before the attacks, because presidents going back to Ronald Reagan have shared a belief that contracting with private companies for services is better than hiring more government employees to do the work. Everything about the United States has grown significantly since the 1980s--the population, the economy, the federal budget--except for the size of the federal workforce. Still, Fuller has a pretty good handle on how much the war on terror has supercharged the spending.

"We've calculated that, without 9/11, procurement spending in the region would have grown $5.5 billion over the last four years," he explains. "But 9/11 happened, and the actual growth was $18.5 billion." The difference between those two numbers -- $13 billion -- is another way of glimpsing the prosperity that has followed after the fireballs. "Each billion in additional procurement spending generates approximately 7,000 new jobs," Fuller adds.

What kinds of jobs? Fuller has still more PowerPoint slides. Washington leads the nation in total job production over the past five years, thanks to the post-9/11 rush, with other thriving cities far, far behind. This region has created some 200,000 new jobs in that period.

And yet, the Washington area actually trails the rest of the country in the growth of most job categories. Even with all the construction cranes and federal office renovations, we're a bit behind the average in construction jobs. We're way behind in retail, in financial services, in education and health-care jobs. Our new jobs are concentrated in just two categories, Fuller says. First, "professional services" -- meaning highly paid technical, scientific, managerial, consulting and computer-design jobs. And the second category, more mysterious: "other services."

"Those are the people who baby-sit, cut lawns, do dry cleaning and clean the homes of the professional services people," Fuller explains.

The war on terror has given Washington an E-Z Pass for the turnpike to the future. These are precisely the sort of jobs that experts believe will hold the key to tomorrow's economy. The region has roughly 2 percent of the total American workforce, but more than 10 percent of the computer systems designers, 8 percent of the consultants and the scientific researchers, 6 percent of the professors and the technologists and the Internet operators. "This is the new economy," Fuller sums up. So we should be very well positioned to prosper indefinitely, provided we don't get incinerated.

MONEY IS HOW GOVERNMENT SAYS, "I CARE." Frowny politicians can hug disaster victims amid scenes of devastation, and that's fine for a day or two. Then people want the bottom line: What's the appropriation? When President Bush went to flooded New Orleans in September to talk about Hurricane Katrina, the key quote was, "I have asked for, and the Congress has provided, more than $60 billion."

The collapse of the twin towers on live television, and the direct hit on the Pentagon, focused governmental concern -- meaning spending -- to an intensity not seen in generations, going back to Pearl Harbor. But something had changed in the intervening decades. After Pearl Harbor, it was easy to see exactly where the money was going. Millions of young men and women joined the government as soldiers, seamen, airmen and clerks. Tanks, airplanes, destroyers and aircraft carriers rolled out of factories and shipyards on round-the-clock shifts. The work never stopped. Bombs, bullets, guns, uniforms, packs, tents, Jeeps, mess kits -- all highly tangible and easily understood. Even the most highly classified supersecret expenditure went searingly public less than four years after Pearl Harbor, when Hiroshima was destroyed by a single bomb.

Today, the output is more elusive. Where is the money going? You can read about a spending bill. You can visit one of the publications or Web sites devoted to tracking the parade of new, rich, inscrutable-sounding government contracts awarded each day. A sampling from a January issue of Washington Technology magazine:

ManTech International Corp., Fairfax, Va., won a $300 million, two-year subcontract from VSE Corp., Alexandria, Va., to provide the Army with support services in Afghanistan and Iraq . . .

Multimax Inc., Largo, Md., won two five-year contracts worth a total of $75.7 million from the Air Force for communications support, testing and IT security services to Air Force organizations at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan for $32.8 million; and Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., for $42.9 million . . . .

Science Applications International Corp. . . . won two contracts worth a total of $68.4 million over three years from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help implement and support the agency's BioSense national syndromic surveillance program. . .

Or you can tour the bollards and cranes.

But it's all amorphous, compared with the sheds full of government workers thrown up on the Mall in the 1940s.

Hoping for a peek at the new wartime economy, I visited last year's Government Security Expo & Conference, or GOVSEC, at the Washington Convention Center. Launched in 2002, GOVSEC is an annual event "for those responsible for protecting government's physical, information and cyber security at the federal, state and local levels." The 2005 conference attracted 6,000 people, many of whom obviously had influence over government spending, because more than 500 companies -- from small inventors to charter members of the military-industrial complex -- waited eagerly to meet them in the exhibition hall.

Booths covering acres of floor space displayed products ranging from flashlights to speedboats. Some of the merchandise was brutally prosaic: jacks for lifting rubble, protective suits for cleaning up toxic debris, civil defense sirens, gas masks, stretchers, shatter-resistant windows. Some of the gear was old technology repackaged for new sales: traffic cones as evacuation markers; police vans souped up into mobile crisis command centers.

Other offerings were snazzy and high-tech; for example, a computer software package called VIS2TA. It was sold by Northrop Grumman, a Los Angeles company that happens to have four offices in Northern Virginia and yet another in Maryland. During World War II, the companies that now make up Northrop Grumman built airplanes and ships. Now they're raking in money writing software. VIS2TA was designed to reduce reams of emergency information into a single database. Suppose a bomb exploded in a VIS2TA town. The computer would quickly produce a city map showing every building in the vicinity of the blast. Click on a building, and up would pop a detailed floor plan and evacuation route. Every hospital, firehouse and police station would feed information into the map, updated as the crisis unfolded. Another layer of data would reveal the weather conditions and project the fallout based on prevailing winds.

But no one would buy just the software package. The same officials who would want VIS2TA would want a powerful new computer network to run it. They would want to house the network in a custom-built command center, like the one Gainer showed me last year inside Capitol Police headquarters. There, inside a secure room, I counted at least 10 big flat-panel displays and dozens of smaller screens showing views from surveillance cameras planted throughout Capitol Hill. There were also scores of phones and computer consoles. One display tracked the direction of the wind, and another reported the locations of key members of Congress. Yet another displayed the paths of nearby aircraft.

What chief would not like to have a space-age setup like this, whether or not he has Gainer's obvious reasons for needing it? And, of course, the command post must be connected to a mobile headquarters, which must be linked to rescue unit crews wearing new hazmat suits and carrying pricey hand-held radios. Multiply all those chiefs times all that gear, connect them through lobbyists and members of Congress to the pipeline of federal money, and you can begin to picture one tributary of the great Doom Boom. One of many.

Strolling up one aisle of GOVSEC and down the next, I was chilled at first by the horrible assumptions underpinning the bazaar. Portable anthrax tests. Bomb-defusing tents. Personal climate systems, for hunting terrorists in extreme heat or cold. Holographic weapons sights. Everything trailed a stink of death and dismemberment. But soon enough an almost giddy feeling of gee whiz replaced the horror: Wow, can they really do that? Have they actually perfected a voice-analyzing "truth verification system"? Is it true that sensors can identify people based on their unique pattern of blood vessels beneath the skin? Can a lightweight barrier really be strong enough to stop a speeding truck? And look at all this James Bond stuff: a cellphone that performs video surveillance; another cellphone that eavesdrops on the conversations of callers nearby.

Not every company hawking a product was based locally, of course. One of the most intriguing devices on display was produced by American Science and Engineering (AS&E), of Billerica, Mass. The company's ZBVs -- "Z Backscatter Vans" -- appeared to be ordinary white delivery trucks, but inside they were packed with supersensitive scanning machines. According to the company sales pitch, one driver in a ZBV can thoroughly search more than 100 cars, trucks, shipping containers, Dumpsters, boxcars -- you name it -- every hour, just by driving slowly past. From the sidewalk, it looks like Mr. Repairman needs a parking space, but, in fact, the van is emitting "backscatter X-rays," whatever those are, in a search for bombs, hidden passengers, illegal drug stashes and so on. Another machine, at the same time, is probing the air for radioactive telltales of nukes and dirty bombs. A ZBV can look through the walls of some buildings and the clothes of passersby. It can park at the curb and scan traffic, or it can race along at highway speeds, scanning the cars alongside. And if you paint FTD on the side, everyone will think it's roses.

AS&E makes these vans in Billerica, but Washington is the place to turn sneaky vans into profits. This is where America keeps its checkbook. This is where the grants are bestowed for purchasing bomb-finders and nuke-sniffers. This is where the money comes from for research and development on the next generation of scanning technologies. This is where a company's executives can have lunch with their lobbyists, should they wish to seek counsel on the best way to dip their corporate pail into the government's cataract of cash.

And so the convention center was a hive of government employees and the smiling salespeople waiting to meet them. Above the bustle, banners announced the presence of mega-companies such as Philips, Raytheon, Glock, Mitsubishi, CompuDyne and many more. Everyone had converged on Washington to think about explosions, fires, piles of rubble, chaos, deadly germs, radiation. And then to translate those thoughts into the more soothing contemplation of moneymaking. And, of course, to enjoy the shops and restaurants.

IS IT BAD TO PROSPER IN A CRISIS, to thrive on adversity? The moral factors are not clear. Doctors do well in an epidemic, and everyone says thank you. On the other hand, a lawyer who passes out cards in the emergency room after a school bus crash is slime. So what about Washington? Are we more like the healers or the ambulance-chasers?

However you answer that one, the link between bad news and good times is central to this city's history. The Civil War worked wonders for the development of Washington. In 1860, on the eve of the catastrophe, Washington had just two paved streets, no standing police force and an open sewer behind the White House. A Union private, arriving from New York shortly after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, was disappointed to find the capital "little better than a country town." Within a few months, however, 100,000 soldiers had followed him to Washington, and the transformation had begun.

That boom surely felt a bit like our own, at least in the beginning: tense, anxious, rife with intrigue and rumors of an impending attack. And yet, the hotels were packed, the saloons bustling, the theaters sold out. Inventors streamed to the capital carrying prototypes for repeating rifles, machine guns, artillery and bombs. The big hotel run by the Willard brothers at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue became "a 'seething cauldron' of commercial intrigues," in the words of writer Ernest B. Furgurson, "jammed with cigar-smoking salesmen and lobbyists touting materials of war." In his history of Civil War Washington, Freedom Rising, Furgurson described a frenzied scramble for the barrels of money that Lincoln poured into saving the Union -- fantastic sums for the time, more than $1 million a day.

James "Big Jim" Fisk, for instance, was a failing salesman for the Boston retailer Jordan, Marsh. He heard Lincoln's call for volunteers and, rather than joining a regiment, "remembered the thousands of unsold blankets he had once seen moldering in the store's attic," Furgurson recounted. "Confident that the army would be needing blankets, he came to Washington and set up at Willard's. Stocking the best suite in the house with food, liquor and lighthearted ladies, he became a generous, cork-popping host" to squads of freshly minted government purchasing clerks. Fisk "soon disposed of the moldy blankets for such an absurd profit that the firm was delighted for him to stay on."

"You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you've got the guts to ask," Fisk confided. He wasn't the only person who noticed. One-third of all military contract spending went to overcharges in the early months of the Civil War, a congressional investigation later concluded.

As the war continued, Washington grew into the nerve center for the largest armies the continent had ever seen. Thousands of clerks collected hundreds of millions in new taxes, and spent the money on countless tons of weaponry, food and supplies. True, these Washingtonians weren't dying at places like Antietam and Chickamauga, and not every dollar they spent was spent wisely, honestly or well. But money was the tide that bore the North to its victory, so their frenzy was not in vain.

Some of those clerks stayed in Washington after the crisis was over -- the population of the city grew by 80 percent from 1860 to 1870. Thus, a pattern was begun: What Washington gains in bad times, it never gives up. We see the pattern repeat 70 years later, during the back-to-back disasters of the Great Depression and World War II. Again, Uncle Sam opened wide the money tap. As before, clerks and contractors flocked to the capital for jobs or a piece of the action. The population rose by nearly two-thirds from 1930 to 1950, to more than 800,000 people in the District, with more in the newly sprouting suburbs. The size of the federal workforce in Washington nearly doubled in the five years from 1940 to 1945, from 139,000 to 265,000.

David Brinkley noted in his book about World War II, Washington Goes to War, that many economists predicted a gloomy future for the Washington region once peace returned and the bureaucrats went home. But "they did not understand the basic nature of government," Brinkley explained. "They did not see that with the wartime innovation of the withholding tax, previously unimaginable amounts of money were being extracted from the American people with relatively few complaints. Federal tax collections in 1940 had totaled $5 billion. In 1945, $49 billion. And it was all spent."

It is almost always all spent. The great lesson of Washington, according to veteran lobbyist Ed Rogers, who has watched budgets be made by both Democrats and Republicans, is that "whoever wants to spend the most, wins."

Instead of a postwar recession, the boom continued in peacetime -- a fact, Brinkley noted, that stamped many government leaders as disciples of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. In simplest terms, Keynes advised governments to increase spending during economic downturns as a way to stimulate growth. Sure enough, Washington's unbridled spending on the war had cured the national depression. A generation would go by before Washington saw the rise of a competing school of thought. Economist Robert Mundell's "supply-side" economics contended that, instead of borrowing and spending to spur the economy, government should cut taxes and let the private sector allocate the cash.

Today's Doom Boom might be seen as an experiment in combining the two--substantial tax cuts and massive spending. The supply-siders in the Bush administration and the Republican Congress have dramatically cut taxes while simultaneously saturating the capital with new spending. Two stimulants instead of one. Like sugar-coated chocolate, like diet pills washed down with coffee, this combination has been so economically potent that the whole region is practically vibrating. Most economists are forecasting yet another year of brisk growth in the Washington area, with tens of thousands of new jobs added, new office buildings filling with new tenants, and home prices stabilizing at or near record highs.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported record revenue for the lobbying industry. There's a $68 steak on the menu at Charlie Palmer's on the Hill. And, as I write this sentence, there is a construction crane going up outside my downtown Washington window.

Can this be what bin Laden had in mind?

ANYONE WHO HOPES TO DEFEAT the United States must have a strategy for neutralizing our money. In 1941, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, prepared the surprise attack on the American Navy at Pearl Harbor. Having completed two tours at the Japanese Embassy in Washington as naval attache, Yamamoto had no illusions about American money muscle. Therefore his strategy was to cripple the U.S. fleet just long enough for Japan to seize control of Southeast Asia, which was rich in the natural resources, such as oil and rubber, that Japan needed for its dreams of empire. The best Japan could hope for, Yamamoto told his superiors, was to set the United States back 18 months -- and then seek a treaty. Beyond that, American industry was too strong to be defeated.

As it turned out, the United States needed just six months, not 18, to snap the spine of Yamamoto's navy, but the admiral was correct on the larger point. By 1943, a year and a half after Pearl Harbor, American factories had increased their production of tanks a hundredfold, and were turning out more tanks in a year than Germany produced during the entire war. Construction of warships was up more than tenfold: In 1943, the United States built 15 aircraft carriers -- nearly as many as Japan produced in its entire history. America built nearly 86,000 airplanes in 1943, roughly equal to Japan's output for the whole war. As military historian Alan Gropman of the National Defense University has documented, all this happened despite bureaucratic bungles and nagging inefficiencies from the top of the production chain to the bottom. Still, 18 months after Pearl Harbor -- as the U.S. economy approached its peak wartime effort -- this country was "manufacturing munitions almost equal to the combined total of both its friends and adversaries," Gropman wrote.

And the U.S. economy has only grown mightier since then.

However, bin Laden and company have a very different strategy than Japan did, a "policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," as bin Laden put it in a videotaped address to the American people just before the 2004 presidential election. It is a sort of judo, a leveraging of weakness into strength, known as asymmetric warfare, in which small investments by al-Qaeda defeat huge investments by the United States. Asymmetrically speaking, the cost of destroying the tallest buildings in Manhattan, in 2001, was little more than a plane ticket and a box cutter, given ideologues willing to do it. So it didn't matter that, according to intelligence estimates, the U.S. military was outspending al-Qaeda by more than 10,000 to 1.

Since then, the United States has increased spending on security by more than two-thirds, but our foes are still working that same judo, blowing up commuter trains and military convoys with surplus explosives and junk from around the house: backpacks, trash bags, cellphones, toy cars. The United States has hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of surveillance equipment on the ground, in the air and orbiting in space, but none of those gadgets can find bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The only time we see or hear from them is when they smuggle another cheap audio or videotape to al-Jazeera television. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld summed up in a 2003 memo to his staff: "The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' cost of millions."

Exactly, bin Laden said in the videotape. It worked during the 1980s in Afghanistan. Using "guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition" jihadists "bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," the al-Qaeda leader said.

Can they do the same to the United States?

You may not be surprised to learn that experts disagree about how much damage our budget deficits are doing to the country. Over time, large deficits soak up capital that could go to more useful investments, and America potentially becomes vulnerable to the demands of overseas lenders. But that doesn't mean that, as bin Laden seemed to suggest, the United States is as fragile as the old Soviet Union was. As the Bush administration points out, the U.S. economy has survived more intense spending binges than this one. "Spending as a percentage of the economy is lower than it was under four of the last five presidents," White House strategist Peter Wehner argued in a recent memo, "and the high-water mark for the budget deficit as a percentage of the [economy] . . . is significantly less than was the case in the 1980s."

So the immediate problem may not be bankruptcy. It might be frustration, if Americans conclude that the massive expenditures since 9/11 aren't buying results. While the federal government has been flexing the money muscle of the United States -- hyperstimulating the Washington economy -- the enemy has drawn strength from the economic and political weakness of the Arab world. There's that judo, again. Our strong economy is cranking out software and sensors, bollards and cranes, but weak Muslim economies are cranking out extremists just as fast or faster. "The combined gross domestic product of the 22 countries in the Arab League is less than the GDP of Spain," the 9/11 Commission noted in its 2004 report. "Forty percent of adult Arabs are illiterate, two-thirds of them women. One-third of the broader Middle East lives on less than two dollars a day. Less than 2 percent of the population has access to the Internet."

The Joint Chiefs of Staff recently completed a broad review of American strategy in the war on terror. In the fifth year of Washington's Doom Boom, the generals concluded that we need to be building up Muslim countries with at least as much enthusiasm as we have shown for building up the corridor between Dulles and the Pentagon. If the United States could figure out how to transplant a bit of the energy and prosperity of the Doom Boom to the failing countries of the Middle East, it would do us more good in the long run than bollards in every driveway and scanners on every roof.

This will take a long time, the Joint Chiefs acknowledged, but America will not win this war until ordinary Muslims can safely bet on a moderate future. "The conditions that extremist networks exploit to operate and survive have developed over long periods," the new strategy declared. And so "the effort to alter those conditions will require a long-term, sustained approach," as well.

Leaders from across the political spectrum talk about a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, but, as scholars Derek Chollet and James M. Goldgeier explained in a recent essay, the task may be even more complicated than the successful rebuilding of war-ravaged Europe, if only because building a modern country is more complicated than rebuilding it. They quoted former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt explaining the difference. "Europe possessed a long-standing entrepreneurial heritage, a base of business acumen, a high level of general education and technological knowledge as well as engineering capabilities," Schmidt said. "No Marshall Plan can succeed where such prerequisites do not exist."

Let's hope the government is spending a lot of money on smart people to solve this problem.

If so, maybe someday these smart, prosperous people can live in posh apartments and walk to work in new offices and shop in upscale stores -- all built on the site of the old Washington Convention Center, demolished in 2004. Not long ago, I visited the site at 10th and Eye streets NW. Thanks to the Doom Boom, it is one of the most valuable undeveloped pieces of real estate in America, prime downtown acreage in a thriving city, close to subways and hotels and theaters. My purpose in wandering over was to picture the latent possibilities of such emptiness in this time of extraordinary growth. I tried to think of the space as seeded with future wealth and luxury, requiring nothing but the current government money rain to bring it bloom.

Instead, I found myself thinking: Here's what it looks like after a Washington landmark is destroyed. A huge, fenced scar. An aid to the imagination, should you need one. A glimpse of how failure might look in the battle with bin Ladenism.

David Von Drehle is a Magazine staff writer. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline
I want people to know that peace is possible even in this stupid day and age. Prem Rawat, June 8, 2008







Post#10811 at 04-20-2006 10:06 AM by Virgil K. Saari [at '49er, north of the Mesabi Mountains joined Jun 2001 #posts 7,835]
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04-20-2006, 10:06 AM #10811
Join Date
Jun 2001
Location
'49er, north of the Mesabi Mountains
Posts
7,835

DI$

Dis has been sucking money and making itself the richer since "That Man" and the last 4T. It was expanding under Ike in the High, LBJ in the Awkening, and RR in the Unravelling. Dis is always in "crisis" so as to collect higher rents from the Several States. :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:

DI$ be in permanent 4T!







Post#10812 at 04-20-2006 02:10 PM by Bob Butler 54 [at Cove Hold, Carver, MA joined Jul 2001 #posts 6,431]
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04-20-2006, 02:10 PM #10812
Join Date
Jul 2001
Location
Cove Hold, Carver, MA
Posts
6,431

Re: Doom Boom

Quote Originally Posted by The Wonkette
This article, from last Sunday's Washington Post magazine, supports Mike Alexander's theory that We Be 4T.
Rallying 'Round the Flag
Since al-Qaeda declared war on Washington five years ago, the federal city has responded the way it knows best

By David Von Drehle
Sunday, April 9, 2006; W10...

The Joint Chiefs of Staff recently completed a broad review of American strategy in the war on terror. In the fifth year of Washington's Doom Boom, the generals concluded that we need to be building up Muslim countries with at least as much enthusiasm as we have shown for building up the corridor between Dulles and the Pentagon. If the United States could figure out how to transplant a bit of the energy and prosperity of the Doom Boom to the failing countries of the Middle East, it would do us more good in the long run than bollards in every driveway and scanners on every roof.

This will take a long time, the Joint Chiefs acknowledged, but America will not win this war until ordinary Muslims can safely bet on a moderate future. "The conditions that extremist networks exploit to operate and survive have developed over long periods," the new strategy declared. And so "the effort to alter those conditions will require a long-term, sustained approach," as well.

Leaders from across the political spectrum talk about a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, but, as scholars Derek Chollet and James M. Goldgeier explained in a recent essay, the task may be even more complicated than the successful rebuilding of war-ravaged Europe, if only because building a modern country is more complicated than rebuilding it. They quoted former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt explaining the difference. "Europe possessed a long-standing entrepreneurial heritage, a base of business acumen, a high level of general education and technological knowledge as well as engineering capabilities," Schmidt said. "No Marshall Plan can succeed where such prerequisites do not exist."
I can agree with this. I've been saying it in abstract in various ways. As agricultural and manufacturing methods become more efficient -- moving people from the agricultural sector, to manufacturing sector, to service sector -- the economy, society and government must adjust in profound ways. Using military force to maintain the status quo without addressing fundamental causes is futile.

The West, in being the first civilization to integrate technology into a new sort of society, has fought any number of crisis wars, has addressed any number of social and labor issues. Other civilizations have an advantage in that they can look at what we have done to get some possible answers to difficult questions. This does not make it easier to let go of old values. A good sized fraction of any society will not release their existing way of life, their traditional way of solving problems, without an intense and often violent effort to maintain the status quo. And if the West provides one set of solutions to the need for change, the need to compete economically with the West forces a need for speed, a pressure to make the transition quickly.

In abstract, from a distance, it is easy to say the Middle East's agricultural age economy governed by autocratic leadership is doomed. From the inside, the people whose way of life is under siege are no more apt to abandon traditional values and see the need for change than HC. They too have cognitive disconnect. They too can only perceive conflicts in values through the lens of their own values. They are not insane, or fanatic or stupid. They are human. They believe their culture, their religion, their values, their way of life have merit and worth. One should not expect any group of humans to let go of such things lightly.

Thus, I would agree the above article touches near the hub of the basic problems of the international aspects of the upcoming 4T. If anything, it underestimates the difficulties in expediting a shift in culture and values. Whether we are currently in 4T or not is another question. The first catalysts have happened. I strongly suspect the definitive trigger hasn't. As the article suggests, I would not be surprised if the definitive trigger is visible from those big glass windows giving a view of the Capitol Dome.







Post#10813 at 04-20-2006 03:33 PM by catfishncod [at The People's Republic of Cambridge & Possum Town, MS joined Apr 2005 #posts 984]
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Re: DI$

Quote Originally Posted by Virgil K. Saari
Dis has been sucking money and making itself the richer since "That Man" and the last 4T. It was expanding under Ike in the High, LBJ in the Awkening, and RR in the Unravelling. Dis is always in "crisis" so as to collect higher rents from the Several States. :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:

DI$ be in permanent 4T!
I get the distinct sense that the Fourth Rome, which is the Seventh Babylon, does not meet with your approval.
'81, 30/70 X/Millie, trying to live in both Red and Blue America... "Catfish 'n Cod"







Post#10814 at 04-20-2006 05:50 PM by scott 63 [at Birmingham joined Sep 2001 #posts 697]
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I know DA and crew will jump on this as an example of liberal professors who hate America. What I find it interesting, in the context of this forum, is that Bush is being compared by professional historians to the two Presidents who fumbled the previous 3T/4T transitions, Buchanan and Hoover. It's not just nut jobs like us anymore.

The Worst President in History?

Quote Originally Posted by Sean Wilentz
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust.
Leave No Child Behind - Teach Evolution.







Post#10815 at 04-20-2006 05:52 PM by scott 63 [at Birmingham joined Sep 2001 #posts 697]
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Quote Originally Posted by scott 63
I know DA and crew will jump on this as an example of liberal professors who hate America. What I find it interesting, in the context of this forum, is that Bush is being compared by professional historians to the two Presidents who fumbled the previous 3T/4T transitions, Buchanan and Hoover. It's not just nut jobs like us anymore.

The Worst President in History?

Quote Originally Posted by Sean Wilentz
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust.
It gets better:

He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities.
Leave No Child Behind - Teach Evolution.







Post#10816 at 04-20-2006 05:54 PM by Bob Butler 54 [at Cove Hold, Carver, MA joined Jul 2001 #posts 6,431]
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Re: DI$

Quote Originally Posted by catfishncod
Quote Originally Posted by Virgil K. Saari
Dis has been sucking money and making itself the richer since "That Man" and the last 4T. It was expanding under Ike in the High, LBJ in the Awakening, and RR in the Unravelling. Dis is always in "crisis" so as to collect higher rents from the Several States. :arrow: :arrow: :arrow:

DI$ be in permanent 4T!
I get the distinct sense that the Fourth Rome, which is the Seventh Babylon, does not meet with your approval.
I have a feeling Mr. Saari is fond of the Agricultural Age. It might be arguable that the Reformation, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution were huge mistakes. If we are turning back clocks, I myself might choose to go back to the Hunter-Gatherer pattern, rather than revisit the autocratic agricultural empires. Our emotions evolved primarily for the hunter gatherer time, pattern, and population density.

Alas, turning back clocks isn't truly an option. Mr. Saari can create a haven of Agricultural Age virtue on his homestead. He reminds me of the Society for Creative Anachronism, recreating the Agricultural Age not as it actually was, but as it ought to have been. The reality is that with more efficient agricultural methods, a small fraction of the population produces the required products with insufficient profit. The huddled masses yearning to breath free can't all huddle on Mr. Saari's land. The agricultural areas cannot economically support the majority of the population, as they once did. Thus, the bulk of the population must move forward, not back, no matter how pleasant Mr. Saari's fantasies might be.







Post#10817 at 04-22-2006 02:07 PM by Zarathustra [at Where the Northwest meets the Southwest joined Mar 2003 #posts 9,198]
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Re: Doom Boom

Quote Originally Posted by The Wonkette
This article, from last Sunday's Washington Post magazine, supports Mike Alexander's theory that We Be 4T. The article is long, but I'm printing it in it's entireity, so that people don't have to register at washingtonpost.com in order to read it. Standard disclaimers apply.

BTW, even if you don't necessarily agree that We Be 4T, it's still a fascinating read . . .
Indeed. Very interesting. Does this indicate that 9/11 triggered a 4T, or that it triggered a surely intense, but ultimately 3T, reaction (like 1917-1920)? Though I still opt for the latter, one must admit some uncertainty.

But I was struck by certain portions of the article (and I really liked the term "Doom Boom"):

And indeed there has been lightning in distant places around the world. Closer to home, however, the response has been less martial than monetary. Military recruitment is down, not up. Rather than meet any hardship, we have loosed the fateful charge cards of America's fat wallet.

Which makes a certain brand of sense: A basic doctrine of war says to mass your strength against your enemy's weakness, and the United States has no more tangible, flexible strength than its economy . . .

. . . . Experts can argue about the long-term vitality of America's money muscle, given our outsourced jobs, sagging industrial base, looming old-age crisis and national debt. But for the time being, U.S. cash flow remains awesome. The federal government is the world's largest consumer of goods and services. The United States produces more buying power each year than the 25 European Union nations combined, though Europe has 160 million more people. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, we produce more than 20 percent of the world's dough. Faced with a crisis, our leaders did what they know best. They started shoveling money . . .

. . . .Today's Doom Boom might be seen as an experiment in combining the two--substantial tax cuts and massive spending . . .

. . . And the U.S. economy has only grown mightier since [World War II].
I see significant discounting and avoidance of some salient points. The author seems to think that Keynesian and monetarist polices will keep us strong and that our economic vulnerabilities are easily handled. Yes, the budget deficit in 1984 was over 6% of GDP and is now about 4% (though both were/are higher if one discounts the Social Security surplus).

But he leaves things out. One, America actually saved money then, now we actually dis-save. Then our economy was underwritten by foreign money to the tune of ~2% of GDP and we were still (barely) a net creditor nation. Now 6% of our economy depends directly upon foreign investment (and growing!). Moreover, we are now a HUGE net debtor nation in hock to the world to the tune of over $4 trillion dollars (an amount growing now growing at a $720 billion annual pace).

What's worse, the US dollar's status as the international reserve currency has bought us a lot of slack, slack that could disappear in an excrutiating moment if it loses that status. The massive net outflow of dollars mentioned above puts that status at risk. How much longer will foreigners put their blood, sweat, and tears into a devaluating currency? How much longer will the major oil producers be willing sell oil only in US dollars?

Our new jobs are concentrated in just two categories, Fuller says. First, "professional services" -- meaning highly paid technical, scientific, managerial, consulting and computer-design jobs. And the second category, more mysterious: "other services."

"Those are the people who baby-sit, cut lawns, do dry cleaning and clean the homes of the professional services people," Fuller explains.

The war on terror has given Washington an E-Z Pass for the turnpike to the future. These are precisely the sort of jobs that experts believe will hold the key to tomorrow's economy. The region has roughly 2 percent of the total American workforce, but more than 10 percent of the computer systems designers, 8 percent of the consultants and the scientific researchers, 6 percent of the professors and the technologists and the Internet operators. "This is the new economy," Fuller sums up. So we should be very well positioned to prosper indefinitely, provided we don't get incinerated.
Sure, maybe the DC area is attracting a lot of high-paying information/service economy jobs, as are some other areas. But in the country as a whole, are such jobs routinely replacing middle-class, industrial-era jobs? No. More often than not the new jobs being created are lower-paying service sector jobs (i.e., McJobs, as opposed to health care or computer sectors ones).

Just as frightening, slowly but surely even many of those high-paying jobs are at risk due to globalization allowing Corporate America access to well-educated information workers in the third world. Heck, there are low-paying service jobs going overseas!!!

The author merely brushes against this topic. What is not underscored is the huge vulnerability this brings to the US economy. Our impressive "purchasing power" is concentrating in the upper socio-economic brackets and is increasingly subsidized by foreign credit. It's a model resembling a house of cards. Impressive, yet flimsy.

However, bin Laden and company have a very different strategy than Japan did, a "policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy," as bin Laden put it in a videotaped address to the American people just before the 2004 presidential election. It is a sort of judo, a leveraging of weakness into strength, known as asymmetric warfare, in which small investments by al-Qaeda defeat huge investments by the United States. Asymmetrically speaking, the cost of destroying the tallest buildings in Manhattan, in 2001, was little more than a plane ticket and a box cutter, given ideologues willing to do it. So it didn't matter that, according to intelligence estimates, the U.S. military was outspending al-Qaeda by more than 10,000 to 1 . . .

. . . As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld summed up in a 2003 memo to his staff: "The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' cost of millions."

Exactly, bin Laden said in the videotape. It worked during the 1980s in Afghanistan. Using "guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition" jihadists "bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," the al-Qaeda leader said.

Can they do the same to the United States?

You may not be surprised to learn that experts disagree about how much damage our budget deficits are doing to the country. Over time, large deficits soak up capital that could go to more useful investments, and America potentially becomes vulnerable to the demands of overseas lenders. But that doesn't mean that, as bin Laden seemed to suggest, the United States is as fragile as the old Soviet Union was. As the Bush administration points out, the U.S. economy has survived more intense spending binges than this one. "Spending as a percentage of the economy is lower than it was under four of the last five presidents," White House strategist Peter Wehner argued in a recent memo, "and the high-water mark for the budget deficit as a percentage of the [economy] . . . is significantly less than was the case in the 1980s."
The weaknesses I've mentioned make Bin Laden's objectives frighteningly plausible. Few realized how economically vulnerable the Soviet Union was in the 1980's. Few realize, or want to realize, how vulnerable we are today. This is not to say the US is on the verge of collapse. I'm only saying that there are very significant vulnerabilities here not be taken into full consideration.

However you answer that one, the link between bad news and good times is central to this city's history. The Civil War worked wonders for the development of Washington. In 1860, on the eve of the catastrophe, Washington had just two paved streets, no standing police force and an open sewer behind the White House. A Union private, arriving from New York shortly after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, was disappointed to find the capital "little better than a country town." Within a few months, however, 100,000 soldiers had followed him to Washington, and the transformation had begun.

That boom surely felt a bit like our own . . .

. . . Some of those clerks stayed in Washington after the crisis was over -- the population of the city grew by 80 percent from 1860 to 1870. Thus, a pattern was begun: What Washington gains in bad times, it never gives up. We see the pattern repeat 70 years later, during the back-to-back disasters of the Great Depression and World War II. Again, Uncle Sam opened wide the money tap. As before, clerks and contractors flocked to the capital for jobs or a piece of the action. The population rose by nearly two-thirds from 1930 to 1950, to more than 800,000 people in the District, with more in the newly sprouting suburbs. The size of the federal workforce in Washington nearly doubled in the five years from 1940 to 1945, from 139,000 to 265,000.

David Brinkley noted in his book about World War II, Washington Goes to War, that many economists predicted a gloomy future for the Washington region once peace returned and the bureaucrats went home. But "they did not understand the basic nature of government," Brinkley explained . . .
The fact that Washington is growing, similar to how it grew in the last two 4T's, is an impressive argument for 4T. I just wonder: Did Washington experience a boom in the late 1910's due to WWI spending?

Thanks for the article, Jenny. Regardless of my criticisms, it was interesting.
Americans have had enough of glitz and roar . . Foreboding has deepened, and spiritual currents have darkened . . .
THE FOURTH TURNING IS AT HAND.
See T4T, p. 253.







Post#10818 at 04-26-2006 03:25 AM by Tom Mazanec [at NE Ohio 1958 joined Sep 2001 #posts 1,511]
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Post#10819 at 04-26-2006 07:21 AM by Bob Butler 54 [at Cove Hold, Carver, MA joined Jul 2001 #posts 6,431]
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Quote Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec
Unlike most government workers who pass information to reporters, McCarthy had signed the pledge of secrecy that attends employment in the nation's intelligence services. And, working as she did in the office that polices CIA activities around the world, the agency had good reason to believe she would treat secrets as secrets. She did not; she is gone.

Perhaps in passing the information along, she felt she was performing a higher duty. But that lofty motive gains no support from this fact: She gave $7,000 to the presidential campaign of Democrat John Kerry in 2004. That smacks of partisan motivation.
I think it depends on the politics of the editors. I've found the same basic facts spun as the administration punishing those who give to the opposition. I've also seen articles emphasizing that the administration will leak for political gain, then prosecute those who leak to expose criminal activity. I see 3T spin as usual. Depending on one's values, one might see in the same act political gain, criminal activity, or patriotic concern for one's country.







Post#10820 at 04-26-2006 08:30 AM by antichrist [at I'm in the Big City now, boy! joined Sep 2003 #posts 1,655]
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Quote Originally Posted by scott 63
I know DA and crew will jump on this as an example of liberal professors who hate America. What I find it interesting, in the context of this forum, is that Bush is being compared by professional historians to the two Presidents who fumbled the previous 3T/4T transitions, Buchanan and Hoover. It's not just nut jobs like us anymore.

The Worst President in History?

Quote Originally Posted by Sean Wilentz
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust.
Of course, if we take this T4T-stuff seriously, then no president where Bush is could have done a good job.

On a 3T/4T cusp you are going to by definition have some citizens who are thinking 4T, some who are thinking 3T, and you are going to have looming infrastructural, economic, and perhaps military problems - which may or may not have been identified yet.

Theoretically speaking at least, while Kerry may have acted differently, he would have fared no better.







Post#10821 at 04-26-2006 08:49 AM by Bob Butler 54 [at Cove Hold, Carver, MA joined Jul 2001 #posts 6,431]
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Quote Originally Posted by antichrist
Of course, if we take this T4T-stuff seriously, then no president where Bush is could have done a good job.

On a 3T/4T cusp you are going to by definition have some citizens who are thinking 4T, some who are thinking 3T, and you are going to have looming infrastructural, economic, and perhaps military problems - which may or may not have been identified yet.

Theoretically speaking at least, while Kerry may have acted differently, he would have fared no better.
I do take this T4T stuff seriously, but I'm not quite sure I'd accept this wording. Yes, the president before the Grey Champion will be perceived as a failure, as clinging too firmly to older values, as not making the changes necessary to solve a crisis. This punts a few questions. If the Grey Champion is elected four years earlier, does this change the identity of the bad president who came before? More importantly, I would think Grey Champions would be unelectable until the people are ready for change. The situation has to be pretty messed up before people will elect someone promising radical change.

Me, I don't see that Kerry was pushing for radical change. I'd agree, he would have done a few things different. Some of the catalysts might have been moderated, others exaggerated. (If a significant effort was being made to balance the budget, it isn't clear that Katrina would have been handled any better. I don't know how he could have made Iraq turn out happy.)

So there might be some truth in the above. At this point in the cycle, we are biased towards misery.







Post#10822 at 04-26-2006 10:39 AM by Marx & Lennon [at '47 cohort still lost in Falwelland joined Sep 2001 #posts 16,709]
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Quote Originally Posted by antichrist
Quote Originally Posted by scott 63
I know DA and crew will jump on this as an example of liberal professors who hate America. What I find it interesting, in the context of this forum, is that Bush is being compared by professional historians to the two Presidents who fumbled the previous 3T/4T transitions, Buchanan and Hoover. It's not just nut jobs like us anymore.

The Worst President in History?

Quote Originally Posted by Sean Wilentz
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust.
Of course, if we take this T4T-stuff seriously, then no president where Bush is could have done a good job.

On a 3T/4T cusp you are going to by definition have some citizens who are thinking 4T, some who are thinking 3T, and you are going to have looming infrastructural, economic, and perhaps military problems - which may or may not have been identified yet.

Theoretically speaking at least, while Kerry may have acted differently, he would have fared no better.
Note that 3 of the 4 Presidents listed fall into the 3T/4T cusp category. Andrew Johnson is, as usual, the anomoly.
Marx: Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Lennon: You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.







Post#10823 at 05-08-2006 11:47 AM by antichrist [at I'm in the Big City now, boy! joined Sep 2003 #posts 1,655]
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So who else thinks these David Blaine stunts are quite 3t? Several times in the bibles, the authors talk about the day the flagpole sitters just got down. Perhaps when David Blaine's stunts simply aren't intersting, we will be seeing a barometric change?

Note also that the article also references the "gates" art installation at central park last year. 'Noone understood it, but everyone went to see it.' That's not 4t art, that's 3t art.


http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/bla...940460019.html







Post#10824 at 05-08-2006 01:04 PM by scott 63 [at Birmingham joined Sep 2001 #posts 697]
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Quote Originally Posted by antichrist
Quote Originally Posted by scott 63
I know DA and crew will jump on this as an example of liberal professors who hate America. What I find it interesting, in the context of this forum, is that Bush is being compared by professional historians to the two Presidents who fumbled the previous 3T/4T transitions, Buchanan and Hoover. It's not just nut jobs like us anymore.

The Worst President in History?

Quote Originally Posted by Sean Wilentz
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust.
Of course, if we take this T4T-stuff seriously, then no president where Bush is could have done a good job.

On a 3T/4T cusp you are going to by definition have some citizens who are thinking 4T, some who are thinking 3T, and you are going to have looming infrastructural, economic, and perhaps military problems - which may or may not have been identified yet.

Theoretically speaking at least, while Kerry may have acted differently, he would have fared no better.
Or do we elect 3T Presidents in the run up to a Crisis because we are not yet ready to face the changes that will be required to survive one?

A potential Gray Champiion, elected too early, however, would indeed flop. Mind you, Kerry aint no Gray Champion. He might have painted a preposterous figure to historians. GCs have a habit of coming out of nowhere - we can only guess who that might be this time around. Although Dubya fits that description I'll take you out back if you dare put him up for GC! Or would a Red State GC actually resemble the AntiChrist, hmm ... :wink:
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Post#10825 at 05-08-2006 11:16 PM by Roadbldr '59 [at Vancouver, Washington joined Jul 2001 #posts 8,275]
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Quote Originally Posted by antichrist
So who else thinks these David Blaine stunts are quite 3t? Several times in the bibles, the authors talk about the day the flagpole sitters just got down. Perhaps when David Blaine's stunts simply aren't intersting, we will be seeing a barometric change?

Note also that the article also references the "gates" art installation at central park last year. 'Noone understood it, but everyone went to see it.' That's not 4t art, that's 3t art.


http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/bla...940460019.html
Who the heck is David Blaine??? 8)
"Better hurry. There's a storm coming. His storm!!!" :-O -Abigail Freemantle, "The Stand" by Stephen King
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