The Exercise of Vital Powers

9/11 and Government incompetence claim two more victims

Turkey is so impressed with the EU’s “soft power” and “moral authority” that Ankara has put EU membership on the back burner. Instead:

Semih Idiz, a foreign affairs columnist, goes further: “The EU is off the radar. It has confirmed Turkey’s worst expectations. At present, it’s an irrelevancy.” Vodkapundit - All the News That’s Fit to Drink

An excellent summary of where the world is going in the next 50 years.

The four major transformations we are seeing:
1. The War in Iraq and the effort to modernize the Islamic world
2. China as an emerging super-power
3. Population decline in western countries (Japan, Europe and the US)
4. The “fracturing” of American business into smaller, more efficient entities

Only #4 was really a new insite for me. His example was IBM. In the olden days, IBM made the machine. Now Intel makes the chips, Microsoft makes the software, NVIDIA makes the graphics card, etc. Even that isn’t the case anymore. Intel and NVIDIA design the chips, companies in Asia actually make them. We are seeing a fracturing of american business all they way down the supply chain.

This is great news for those of us in the creative work force. Well great news if we are able willing to always be innovating and learning new things. Its bad news for the people who bought into the “Get a good education, find a job at a good company, settle down and raise a family” BS of our parents and grandparents generation. More and more people will become independent guns - brought in to apply their experise to solve a certian problem, then jump ship to the next company to solve the next problem.

The biggest impact of that for policy makers is how we manage health care in this country. With people in my generation and career path changing jobs every few years, employer provided health care is an ugly mess. We need to move away from employer provided care and insurance companies paying for every little thing. Your auto-insurace company doesn’t pay for your oil changes, your health insurance company shouldn’t be paying for your annual checkup. We need high-deductable policies to cover unexpected issues like cancer or heart disease and medical savings accounts (or better: the FairTax) to reduce the cost of the annual maintenance stuff. Finally we need doctors and medical professionals to pull out of the HMO racket and setup real practices where the market and not HMOs, PPOs and the government set the prices of routine doctor’s visits.

Here is the full article. I highly suggest you read it.
The Braden Files : A Global Intelligence Briefing For CEOs

Will pretty much sums up my take on the Bush Administration.

Good Will Hinton’s Free Market Thoughts and Political Review » Blog Archive » Regretting Bush

I disagree that ““Those who would have us pull out of Iraq are unwittingly encouraging our enemies” is simply a slur”. I do believe that the timetable crowd emboldens the enemy by making them think “we win if we can outlast them, and we can speed things up with lots of little attacks”.

Hindsight is 20/20 and I should have known then what I know now. When the stakes are who gets to divy up the spoils of a 1.4 Trillion dollar budget the opposition will stop at nothing to take down the governing party, national security, peace in the middle east, freedom for millions or Iraqis be damned.

It’s [ joining a bloggers tour of Iraq is ] simple, really. You just contact the Office of Public Affairs, which is part of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and you ask. Of course, there is something of a process. You do need to demonstrate seriousness of purpose and a track record of thoughtful writing on the war would probably stand you in good stead, but there is no political litmus test. (How we got to go to Iraq | Redstate)

Somehow I doubt the DoD would say this blog is serious, when I post something of substance maybe once every two weeks.

President Bush was in Atlanta on Thursday speaking to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. This was the 3rd of 4th in a series of speeches trumpeting the Administration’s accomplishments in the War on Terror. The day before the President revealed that some Al Qaeda operatives had been held in secret detention facilities overseas. His speech on Thursday didn’t contain much in the way of revelations, but there was some interesting content.
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So I’m watching the first half of The Path to 9/11 - the half that deals with the Clinton Administration, and I can see why they wanted to silence it. Its not that the movie reflect poorly on Bill Clinton. Its that it makes all of Clinton’s underlings looks like the spineless wimps they are.

And if you’re hoping your party is going to re-take the White House in 2 years, you don’t want the American Public associating you with the decision not to take down Bin Laden in 1998.

Madeline Albright comes out looking particularly idiotic.

Found this on The Political Vine:
Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000, or 20% of the world population…

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature: 1988 - Najib Mahfooz.

Peace:
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1994 - Yaser Arafat

Physics:
1990 - Elias James Corey
1999 - Ahmed Zewail

Medicine:
1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
1998 - Ferid Mourad
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I was working at Naviant as a contractor. They had laid off most of the office and I was brought in to decom the Datacenter. To stave off the silence I’d listen to the radio. I was listening to WSB, Boortz had just begin his local half hour, when they broke in to say a small plane hit the WTC. My thought was “Oh, a general aviation accident, whatever, it might make for an interesting picture”. A few minutes later a friend IMs me saying check out CNN.com - the WTC exploded. Being from New York, I remember the stories of the B25 crashing into the Empire State Building in the 40s, there was no explosion and little loss of life. Most of the ESB was unoccupied because of the depression.

Well, I went to CNN.com saw the pictures and said to myself, “that’s no small plane, what the fuck?”

We had a TV in the break room, but no cable or dish so we were only able to get a fuzzy feed of NBC. NBC was already on the national feed, and the few people left in the office crowded in there.

I remember watching the live feed from further up downtown, when I saw a dark spec behind the other tower. I saw it again and realized that a plane was flying awfully low. I’d flown in to LGA many times, and one landing pattern takes you right over the WTC, so that didn’t seem out of the ordinary. When I saw the second tower explode I first thought what kind of fucked up weather pattern would cause a jet to lose altitude so fast (there are cases of turbulence causing aircraft to lose thousands of feet of altitude in seconds). Then the anchor said something about terrorism and I realized this shit was bad.
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