Barrel Strength

George Friedman is head of Stratfor, a strategic forecasting firm whose analysis may have passed by your desk from time to time.

Friedman has written a most entertaining romp through the next hundred years. Whether right or wrong he helps open one’s mind to the larger picture. Friedman’s intellectual base is in demography, geography and technology: geopolitics. Religion figures little in his view of the next century, whereas I think it is already the prime driving force of the next confrontation, in the form of Islam.

Major predictions:

• The rise of the United States is only beginning. As the only power to bestride the sea lanes between Europe and Asia, with command of both shores, and of inner (near earth)  space,  it is going to continue to rise in importance through the next century.
• China will implode.
• Europe is decadent.
• The Islamic challenge never will amount to much, though Turkey will become a major power by the middle of the century.

Major observations:

• Population growth is crashing everywhere, to be followed by population loss in almost all major countries, with the United states least affected.
• Global warming is irrelevant.
• The computer will continue to reshape economic activity.

My take-away was from his early chapter, on the distinction between barbarism, civilization, and decadence.

• barbarism is the belief that the mores and virtues of your tribe or village are what all of humanity should embrace, and you are ready to take fire and sword to your neighbours or foreigners to make them agree.
• Civilization is the acceptance that the world is full of barbarians and that one needs to fight  selectively, if barbarically, to save civilized codes of conduct.
• Decadence is the belief that there is no real distinction between civilization and barbarism, and if there is, it is hardly worth fighting for.

On the computer, he says that it causes us to de-emphasize all aspects of reality and of our engagement with it that cannot be quantified – the contemplative, the playful, the religious. The corporation is the creature of the quantitification of the computer, and no one can compete with the United States who does not embrace the methods of the computer. To the extent that the computer does not allow for any values other than its own, it is barbaric in the sense of the term used above, and the corporation is a barbarian: exclusively focused on the goals, rules and mores of its own tribe.

I recommend it for a fast read.

Wall St.

During the campaign, Obama was never shy about his promise to undo the Bush tax policies. But it was easy to ignore his occasional lapses into populist rhetoric and focus on his intense intelligence and Ivy League education. Now, in the wake of the crisis, Wall Street’s politics are shifting rightward. “All the rich people I know took George Bush for granted,” says an analyst at a midtown hedge fund. “I’m a Democrat, but I agree with Rush Limbaugh on a lot of this stuff,” rails the wife of a former AIG executive.

Main St.

As a senator, Barack Obama led the charge last year to pass a bill allowing black farmers to seek new discrimination claims against the Agriculture Department. Now he is president, and his administration so far is acting like it wants the potentially budget-busting lawsuits to go away.

The change isn’t sitting well with black farmers who thought they’d get a friendlier reception from Obama after years of resistance from President George W. Bush.

“You can’t blame it on the Bush administration anymore,” said John Boyd, head of the National Black Farmers Association, which has organized the lawsuits. “I can’t figure out for the life of me why the president wouldn’t want to implement a bill that he fought for as a U.S. senator.”

As your correspondent noted in July 2008 during the election campaign, this was a case of mass hysteria akin to the Diana funeral in UK and all logic was suspended.  One can empathize with the black farmers, as they voted along racial lines, along with the rest of the black people, but what can one say about the supposedly supremely rational Masters of the Universe on Wall St.  Perhaps it could be worse because they could have been fooled by other means.

It was twenty-seven years ago that SCTV aired its wickedly accurate spoof of CBC programming. And now the Mother Corpse is living out the fantasy with its rollout of new shows:

Battle of the Blades is an elimination-style challenge that teams up Canada’s top figure skaters with this country’s most daring and versatile hockey stars to compete against one another each week in a glitzy pairs figure skating performance.

[...]

The Republic of Doyle: is a one-hour comedic drama about a father-son team of private investigators. Set against the rugged beauty of St. John’s Newfoundland, it’s an original, entertaining glimpse into the dynamics of the dysfunctional Doyle clan.

All that’s missing from the first one is colour commentary by Howie McMeeker, and we would hope that the second has as its lead-in “Magnum: PEI”.

Oh. Dear. Lord.

One opinion that is prevalent in the leftist circles is that those on the right are stupid.  In fact “stupid conservative” is suppose to be a redundant phrase, like irregardless or an intelligent-Canadian-Cynic-post.  Now there is a survey that can shed light on this question and it notes the following.

Across the 12 knowledge items tested, the biggest gap between Democrats and Republicans comes over awareness of the current level of the Dow. Republicans also are more likely to correctly name Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and know that Tim Geithner’s position is treasury secretary. In addition, a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats know that Obama decided to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and that Ford is the U.S. automaker that has not taken emergency government loans.

But there is little or no partisan gap in knowledge on some other key items: Democrats and Republicans are about equally likely to know that China holds the most U.S. debt, that Hillary Clinton is secretary of state and that roughly 4,300 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.

The differences in knowledge levels between Republicans and Democrats are mostly a reflection of the different demographics of the two groups. Republicans tend to be older, more educated, higher income and are more likely to be male; each of these characteristics is strongly associated with political and economic knowledge. When these characteristics are held constant — that is, when Republicans and Democrats with similar demographic characteristics are compared — there is little difference between the two groups.

It seems that the facts totally contradict this “reality-based community” canard.  Other than question about the number of US troops killed in Iraq, on which the difference is within the statistical error range, Republican voters are consistently more knowledgeable.  Democrats do particularly poorly on economic items and don’t seem to be engaged in that sector. Of the three groups, Republican, Democrat and Independents, the Democrats are the dumbest of the bunch when it comes to economic facts and the Independents take the cake with non-economic facts.

Perhaps all those cliches about Democrats being dependent on the public sector have some validity.  Too bad they can’t hand out intelligence so that they can join reality.  Of course this doesn’t stop the Democrats from assuming an air of superiority, as the following part of the survey shows.  Democrats are the least knowledgeable when it comes to the economic situation, but they claim to understand the facts surrounding it much better than Independent voters.