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Reagan and the Cold War
One of the many annoying things I often hear is “Reagan won the Cold War”. It’s the wrong question. While the Cold Warn certainly wasn’t won by Jimmy Carter, it wasn’t Reagan either. Here is the analogy I use.
Imagine two men in a bar. They’ve just finished fighting other people together. After that fight is done, they start to squabble amongst themselves. Both men pull guns and a tense standoff ensues.
Neither side has a clear edge as both guns are comparable and effective. The standoff continues for quite some time. Both parties upgrade their weaponry periodically. One of the people spends all of his non-weapon money on health food, while the other spends all of his non-weapon money on crystal meth and salty snacks. After a while the first health food person buys a pricey new SA80 rifle. The meth/salt guy complains about a new arms race, then has a heart attack and dies.
That’s the end of the Cold War. The canard “We outspent them” ignores the fact that Communism is not capable of utilizing resources efficiently, and if the Soviets hadn’t been using their resources on weapons they would be wasting the resources some other way. While Reagan did see the evil nature of communism accurately, he wasn’t responsible for the heart attack. Happily, communism is self-limiting that way.
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The cyber-crime map of the world
Check out this article in Forbes.
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Saturday link roundup
- A nice how-to on HDR photography
- Survivorman is blogging again!
- The greatest living American you’ve never heard of.
- The world’s stupidest Fatwas, my favorite –
Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together.
The injuction against the Polio vaccine is scary though.
- It seems that tires will outlive us all
- More on the Kathryn Johnson case
- A Slate article on the ethanol haters, of which I am one. He leaves out the fact that creating ethanol takes more energy than it produces.
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How to make Google Earth creepy yet funny
Check this out, From Slate. It starts a bit slow, but watch the whole thing
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Friday in appreciation, volume II
The In Appreciation for this week goes not to a person, but to the economic force known as Capital Flight. Wikipedia defines it accurately as
when assets and/or money rapidly flow out of a country, due to an economic event that disturbs investors and causes them to lower their valuation of the assets in that country, or otherwise to lose confidence in its economic strength. This leads to a disappearance of wealth and is usually accompanied by a sharp drop in the exchange rate of the affected country (devaluation).
Modern technology makes it easy to move money from one country to another; giving an immediate cost to bone headed economic decisions and plundering. For examples, think of governments defaulting on debts and anything that has happened in Zimbabwe over the past few years.
So Capital Flight, for enforcing some degree of fiscal and monetary responsibility on the governments for the world, you get my second Friday In Appreciation.
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The in-laws crack the mainstream media!
Actually it’s my brother’s in-laws, but anyway, they were recently recognized by the Atlanta Journal Constitution
Cobb couple showing soldiers they care
Mary and Ed Ettel spend most weekends in their basement creating care packages for troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Kosovo/Serbia. In 16 months, they have mailed 376 boxes weighing 5,723 pounds and helping 6,365 service members.
The east Cobb couple and about a dozen volunteers packed 16 boxes Saturday with snacks and hygiene items. During summer mailings, they add baby wipes, salty snacks and water bottles. They also put in Beanie Babies, candy and sometimes soccer balls for soldiers to give to the children they meet.
The Ettels get requests for items through a program called AnySoldier.com. Soldiers post items they need on the Web site and volunteers kick into action.
…How cool!
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The Dark Tower
Since I can never find the link easily, here is the Coming Anarchy post on The Ryugong, the Dark Tower of North Korea.
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Thursday morning link rapid fire
- Fast Failure’s and Google
- HDR in Photoshop CS III – I still haven’t gotten that to work right, more at this site.
- Andrew Sullivan largely echoes me in what to do with Iraq.
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Finally, a problem we can blame on the Mexicans
It’s not a major problem, but from some reason they (Mexicans) bicycle approaching traffic, which is the way it’s done in Mexico, but not in America. This endangers the cyclist as the amount of time between perception and action is dramatically reduced for both parties, which means that they have less time to avoid each other. It’s particularly bad at night. Also the Tullock Effect is reduced as avoidance is not the clear responsibility of either party.
I saw three people doing it yesterday.
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Setting the bar quite low
Randy Barnett has an interesting article on libertarian opinion and the Iraq war in the Wall Street Journal. It had this little nugget of pessimism disguised as hope
They hope that the early signs of progress in this offensive will continue, so that American and Iraqi forces can achieve the military victory necessary to allow the Iraqi government to assume responsibility for protecting the Iraqi people from terrorists, as well as from religious sectarian violence. They hope this success will enable American soldiers to leave Iraq even before they leave Europe and Korea, and regain the early momentum that led, for example, to Libya’s abandonment of its nuclear weapons program.
WWII ended in 1945, the Cold War in 1991, and Korea has been at truce, if not at peace since 1953. that means we would be in Iraq until 2040 at the earliest?