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See it larger here.  Hat tip to NYkr in DC.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

A BBC podcast on Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War. Perhaps the most sublime work on strategy of all time ( Hat tip to The Warlord)

Next, and unrelated: 

Via blogfriend Robert Paterson, a new talk by educational and creativity thought leader, Sir Ken Robinson. The ritual TED bowing to Al Gore notwithstanding, if you are interested in education issues, this is a must see video.

“The only people celebrating at the Pentagon last week were the Mexicans working on renovating the building.”                               –  Dr. Loren Thompson

It takes a rare class of wit to combine an allusion to an ethnic minority group while shilling for a fabulously overpaid and notoriously dysfunctional industry that is anxious that we are spending too much money on the war wounded. Full story at Danger Room.

Remember people, every dollar wasted on caring for a critically injured combat veteran, or on a pay raise that keeps a private’s family off of food stamps is a dollar that could have gone to cost overruns or a desperately needed executive bonus.

Oligarchy is not good.

 ….But as soon as the people got leaders, they cooperated with them against the dynasty for the reasons I have mentioned; and then kingship and despotism were alike entirely abolished, and aristocracy once more began to revive and start afresh. For in their immediate gratitude to those who had deposed the despots, the people employed them as leaders, and entrusted their interests to them; who, looking upon this charge at first as a great privilege, made the public advantage their chief concern, and conducted all kinds of business, public or private, with diligence and caution.

16    But when the sons of these men received the same position of authority from their fathers-having had no experience of misfortunes, and none at all of civil equality and freedom of speech, but having been bred up from the first under the shadow of their fathers’ authority and lofty position-some of them gave themselves up with passion to avarice and unscrupulous love of money, others to drinking and the boundless debaucheries which accompanies it, and others to the violation of women or the forcible appropriation of boys; and so they turned an aristocracy into an oligarchy. But it was not long before they roused in the minds of the people the same feelings as before; and their fall therefore was very like the disaster which befell the tyrants.

                                                       – Polybius

I have made, from time to time, the observation that the elite in American society is trending in its favored policies toward conscious promotion of oligarchy. Over at The Committee of Public Safety, Joseph Fouche quoted a theorist, retired CIA analyst Patrick E. Kennon, who is a delighted advocate of a coming technocratic oligarchy:

“Now, as we enter the twenty-first century, the future of the nation-state is much in doubt…Indeed, tribalism has revived with a brutal savagery from Rwanda and Cambodia to the newly dissolved USSR and the newly unified Germany…At the same time, a kind of shadow empire…is being embraced by elites around the globe. UN bureaucrats and Greenpeace activists, Carlos the Jackal and Mother Theresa, Toyota and Amnesty International, the Cali drug cartel and the World Bank, people who worry about the dollar-yen ratio and people who worry about the ozone layer, all of these consciously or unconsciously look to empire for their profit or salvation. All of these have largely given up on the nation.”

Oligarchs elevate self-interest and class interest over national interest, it’s the signature of oligarchy, be it the Thirty Tyrants or the Soviet nomenklatura. Milovan Djilas knew what the hell he was writing about as much as did Thucydides.

What to do?

The proto-oligarchical class in America, the elite who are the product of “the good schools”, tend to embrace and celebrate progressive taxation and diversity as high moral principles. What if we applied them?

The gateway to membership in the elite and opportunities for fabulous wealth and power runs through the admissions offices of our best universities, the Ivy League and a few other select intitutions and a handful of old, highly exclusive, liberal arts colleges. What if we put a special surtax on the purchase of tuition on a sliding scale that correlated with how many generations that members of a family have matriculated at such schools? Plus a few other tweaks here and there.

For example, a student who is the first in their family to go to college and was accepted by Yale would not be taxed at all, perhaps instead, they would be subsidized with a free ride for four years. But someone like Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, a Dartmouth grad who was the son of a Dartmouth grad and a Ford Foundation executive, his kids might face a steep penalty, maybe a $ 250,000 per annum fee on top of tuition, then an additional surcharge to their income tax rates if they entered government service or certain professions like, say, hedge fund management, for the next couple of decades. Entering a different field, say becoming a social worker, a bowling alley manager or a policeman would not incur any income tax surcharge.

We can argue about the appropriate level of progressive taxation but the basic idea is that we could make it increasingly expensive for a family to continue to perpetuate itself, generation after generation, at the political and economic heart of American power. Not impossible, that would be un-American, but very, very expensive.

The net result would be far greater “diversity” at our flagship educational institutions – far more white ethnics whose last names end in vowels, Catholics, Jews, Eastern Orthodox, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, Southerners, Midwesterners and Westerners, people hailing from small towns or blue collar socioeconomic backgrounds. Currently favored demographic groups might be markedly reduced under such a system but since most of them come from long established UMC to UC families with great connections, they’ll be ok even going to Big State U. and getting a third tier school degree.  No worries.

Thoughts?

This sounds very much like Crossfit:

New soldiers are grunting through the kind of stretches and twists found in “ab blaster” classes at suburban gyms as the Army revamps its basic training regimen for the first time in three decades.

Heeding the advice of Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans, commanders are dropping five-mile runs and bayonet drills in favor of zigzag sprints and exercises that hone core muscles. Battlefield sergeants say that’s the kind of fitness needed to dodge across alleys, walk patrol with heavy packs and body armor or haul a buddy out of a burning vehicle.

And this is hilarious – and largely true in my observation, at least for most LMC -UMC suburban teen-agers who become Army recruits:

Trainers also want to toughen recruits who are often more familiar with Facebook than fistfights.

….But they need to learn how to fight.

“Most of these soldiers have never been in a fistfight or any kind of a physical confrontation. They are stunned when they get smacked in the face,” said Capt. Scott Sewell, overseeing almost 190 trainees in their third week of training. “We are trying to get them to act, to think like warriors.”

Godspeed to you, Captain Sewell. And a hat tip to Dave Dilegge. 

The culture has changed. School anti-bullying programs have eliminated a lot of the physical aspects of student conflicts but had the unanticipated effect of making the nonphysical but verbal and social bullying far worse because organized ostracism, slander and anonymous internet harrassment are far harder for school authorities to prove in court when challenged by the always litigious parents of the chronic bullies who have (finally) been disciplined.

Consequently, most suburban kids a) feel quite safe in saying unbelievably heinous things to each other that a generation ago, and certainly two generations earlier, would have resulted in an instant punch in the mouth, if not a savage public beating; and b) are completely inept at defending themselves when they come across someone outside their narrow, whitebread, cultural zone who takes offense at their wanton disrespect and reacts with an “old school” response. They are the Emo generation.

Coupled with a widespread loathing of physical exercise and an expectation of gratuitous consumer-debt financed luxury, a sizable segment of young Americans are better prepared for conflict in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles than joining the Army. Or even a moderately resilient soccer team.

Thus concludes my cranky, old man, rant. 🙂