I think it was johnqeniac who suggested making this public. Combine CSPAN with Court TV and we have torture TV (TTV). Everyone can have hoods so identities are protected. There would be no sound so revealed secrets would be protected. Just one guy withing in silent agony and panic while the torturers high five and run off with valuable information. If this were the only way the US could torture, I think it would never do it.

Actually, one man who murdered 3000 remaining in Pakistan makes a lot more sense than locking up millions for drug offenses. If the law is to make sense, let's apply those efforts where they will do the most good. Other countries do not find it necessary to do what we do, and they are doing just fine.

is the frequent depiction, in movies, cheap novels, etc. of accountants as unmanly in the extreme. After all, they payed attention in school and learned elementary arithmetic, something no real man bothers with. Kagan then borrows this attitude to make himself and his followers look more manly, something he and they are in desperate need of.

Bankers wear suits and have expensive lunches. They hire accountants who wear the eye shades, bring bag lunches, and get pushed around by entry level secretaries.

Now there is another kind who wears the shade: certain old fashioned poker players, who always beat the odds. But that is different; those eye shades make the man.

This might not be completely accurate, but it gives an idea: (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia)/mo-budget.htm:

By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union devoted between 15 and 17 percent of its annual gross national product to military spending, according to United States government sources. Until the early 1980s, Soviet defense expenditures rose between 4 and 7 percent per year. Subsequently, they slowed as the yearly growth in Soviet GNP slipped to about 3 percent.

The USSR spent a much higher percentage than the US does, a percentage that had a huge drain on a nearly dead economy. It is difficult to understand just how wealthy the US still is, and so military spending is not going to bankrupt the US directly; it will destroy it in other more subtle ways, such as the further erosion of ethics. Do many of the people in power in the US care how we treat the rest of the world? They should.

Your poetry delights my inner Kagan!

Chalmers Johnson continues his documentation of the death of the republic through military empire in this article on the web.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175029/chalmers_johnson_economic_death_spiral_at_the_pentagon

Neither the TomDispatch wrapper around the Johnson article or the article itself show any such thing. Johnson compares the possible death of the US automobile industry to the current situation of the defense industry by stating "A similar, if far less well known, crisis exists when it comes to the military-industrial complex." Bullshit! The auto industry has to sell autos; the defense industry merely has to peddle weapon fantasies to overage adolescents. And it is doing that better than ever.

Then we have "Given our economic crisis, the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable." Bullshit again! The rest of the article does not make any kind of case for this; it does demonstrate how wasteful the spending is. No kidding? Any fool can see that a trillion dollars is a lot money and it would be better spent on other things, but if you are going to claim that is the death of the republic, show me some real evidence.

wrote:

...we seem content to shovel money into the gaping maw of the military-industrial complex as though no economic trade-off were involved.

There are economic trade offs, of course. But I see no evidence that military spending is preventing universal health care in the US. We have other reasons for that.

wrote:

3000 years of history tell us that, without exception, empires fall when they devote too much of their productivity and resources to militaristic expansion.

But how much is too much? There are many very good reasons for the US not to spend nearly so much money on the military. Show me that one of them is that that the current percentage of GDP will cause the empire to fall.

wrote:

Sulzer: Two problems with your claims. 1) You asserted that the Soviet percentage of military spending was much higher than the U.S.'s, but, ah, strangely, you seemed to have omitted the percentages for the U. S. so we could compare for ourselves, and 2) the source you cite appears to be military.

If you argue that the absence of a well-known number, or at least an approximately well-known number, invalidates a claim then you have no counter-claim.

wrote:

You might fool whole countries Holly, but the planet is not warming over carbon. In fact, evidence has always been it is cooling.

So the huge amount of ice mass lost in the previous decades is the result of global cooling? Or are you claiming that the earth is warming from natural causes, and the additional CO2 is helping to slow that down? You have to explain why so much ice has melted, and the explanation must be consistent with reality.

I wonder if you would agree there are limits to what the government can spend?

Long term yes. And reducing military spending would go a long way towards staying in bounds. But the primary reason for stopping this is moral. Some folks get rich making the weapons. These weapons are used to kill others for no better reason than the continued welfare of those who make the weapons.

to demonstrate that he really is over the edge. It was not just a matter of getting the goodies for his friends. He really believes this crap!