January 23

 January 23

I haven't posted much so far this year because noting much seems to have changed. The only difference between 2022 and 2021 has been the rising speculation about the midterm elections and what Biden's last three years will be like with the infantile squabbling in our legislature and the hard right turn at the Supreme Court. I think last time I quoted the lyrics to the Merry Minuet and linked to For What Its Worth. Actually, I just looked back at the posts and I used that quote and link on January 1. Right now I feel more like referring you to the lyrics of Blowin' In The Wind. Too many commentators have observed over the last couple of weeks that we seem to be fighting the same battles we thought were already won. Civil rights, voting rights, women's rights--hell let's just cut to the chase--human rights all are in retreat with certain groups being redefined as somehow less than fully human.

And perhaps a good bit more is being redefined--like the U.S. position in the world. I have just started reading Alfred McCoy's To Govern The Globe. He makes an interesting observation: in the last 500 years we have had three "world orders" dominated by three different empires--the Iberian order (Spain), the British, and the American. In each the pinnacle of power for the three came only a couple of decades before their decline. Spain around 1570 massed a great fleet that destroyed a Moorish fleet in the Mediterranean but in 1588 another great Spanish Armada was destroyed trying to invade England, a blow from which Spain never recovered. In the 1890s England's dominance seemed to be cemented with the roll out of the Dreadnaught line a massive battleships triggering an arms race especially with Germany (but also Japan). But the battleships played little role in the course of the World War era (1914-45) and in the post war era Britain's empire fell apart. In 2000 the U.S. seemed similarly positioned at the apex of world power with aircraft carrier fleets positioned on seas world wide.

McCoy makes another point: the power of each of the three empires marched in lockstep with their economic power. As their economic power declined so did their military power. David Kaiser has a post this morning which reinforces some worrisome developments concerning U.S. economic power by examining the recent history of Boeing. This is his key conclusion at the very beginning of the post 

Two years ago, in a post about the superb HBO miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster, I speculated that our institutions, for different reasons, might be as rotten as those in the USSR in its later stages.  Checking that post just now, I see that I referred to a new story (in January 2020) about one of the key mistakes that led to the Boeing disaster.  Now, reading a much more thorough account, I'm inclined to believe that we have further disasters ahead.

 The post isn't that long so I will leave the rest for you to read.

John Michael Greer also has an interesting post this last week. We always talk about "the future" not acknowledging that we actually have "futures." And we should prepare for alternatives and be flexible. A number of pundits have noticed that we judge the future, especially the near future, as a linear progression from the near past. Over the last forty years I have come up against the inconvenient fact that something is (or has) broken and the immediate past is no longer a guide for decisions about what is to come. Once upon a time the received wisdom told us that getting more and newer credentials (high school diploma to bachelor's degree to master's degree to PhD for example) and to go into "good" debt (a.k.a., student loans) to do so was a winning strategy. That hasn't been true for most (not all) of us for the last 30 years.