-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 6:28 AM -0500 11/18/07, Tyler Durden wrote:
The Vietcong chased our guys up the stairs of the ebassy to the choppers.
After a so-called "democratic" congress took away *all* their money? We were winning in Viet Nam. Hell, we *won* the Tet "offensive", for that matter. We lost on college campae, where history is written, apparently, by losers. And in the media, which is the first draft of same, also written by losers, in the long run. Unwash you mind, Tyler, and learn not to regurgitate leftism so much, hmmm? Yes, boys and girls, "empires" are, currently, like for the last 12,000 years or so, what happens when you win too many fights. Life's a bitch and then the empire falls. Which is what Kissinger, oddly enough, is saying. Which is nonetheless true even if The Dick Cheney, er, Darth Vader, Of The Nixon Administration said it. Better inside the tent pissing out, frankly. If you really want to freak your knee-jerk reflex out, go read, horrors, Victor Davis Hanson's "Carnage and Culture", and come back when you change your underwear. The west wins wars because it makes more stuff and kills more people. The VietCommies are knocking on *our* door to do business, not us on theirs. They used the *West's* technology, and even one of its more broken pseudo-sciences-cum-religions, Marxism, because they had none of their own that would work. Still do. Certainly, crypto, and geodesic networks, have the potential to re-organize society, because society maps pretty much to is communications architectures, but, at the moment, we're still stuck in a world of hierarchy and book-entry transactions. Lots of people nailing manifestos on the church doors (see this list, 15 years ago, now...), but nobody's printed 'em for the peasants and princes to read and burn down the cathedrals with yet. Though, strangely enough, Kissinger himself notes, underneath his black helmet and around puffs of his ventilator, and if you can bestill your jerking knees that long to read that far, that the nation-state's days are numbered. Probably, I would claim, because of geodesic networks, and maybe even crypto :-). Kewl. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP Desktop 9.0.6 (Build 6060) iQA/AwUBR0BwB8PxH8jf3ohaEQKUwwCgqhgDzNCSn3s3qMZGiB+mLiQLJ50An3Dw eeK89iW2Zto4yDV0kDK0Q3N0 =wn6r -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'