Suggested reading

Here, you'll want to read this article in The American Conservative¹: The Fall of Modernity: Has the American narrative authored its own undoing? (Andrew Sullivan linked to it earlier today.) Despite the paleoconservative slant, in my first reading I think it's one of the better statements of how the Endless War works to wreck both American culture and actively works against its supposed - or, at least, stated - goals. I agree strongly with some of the author's conclusions (legitimisation, elevation, narrative) and disagree strongly on others (can narrative be changed, is there a meaningful policy path that could be effective in the longer term, several others to smaller degrees)². A few key areas, I think, are left inadequately considered - he does not call out torture explicitly, and I think arguably fails in ignoring the question of control over oil... but the former rolls up into the rest of the point, and the latter could easily be a sound goal he considers to have been subverted.

Anyway, I have some relevant thoughts of my own in relation to this article about the role of energy, population - in particular, control over reproduction - and the spread of rational thought which this margin is too small to contain, but which I will attempt to describe after my biology midterm.

Here's the first paragraph of the article; I recommend clicking through for the rest.

The Fall of Modernity
Has the American narrative authored its own undoing?
February 26, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative
by Michael Vlahos

http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_02_12/feature.html

We are losing our wars in the Muslim world because our vision of history is at odds with reality. This is a well-established condition of successful societies, a condition that inevitably grows more worrisome with time and continuing success. In fact, what empires have most in common is how their sacred narratives come to rule their strategic behavior—and rule it badly. In America’s case, our war narrative works against us to promote our deepest fear: the end of modernity.

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1: No, I'm not a fan of the magazine, and particularly I'm not a fan of its demifascist asshat co-founder, Pat Buchanan. You know it's gotten pretty bad when I'm linking to his former magazine.
2: If you think about the paleoconservative blind spots, you should be able to extrapolate most of these out - as well as some of the things I don't have time for right now.

Also, it's been a bit since a leafpic

Painting the Maples Red
I don't have much going on right now other than school, but I did do the second round of raised-bed soil prep earlier this week, and while I was at it, picked up a good bit of the leaves from last winter - it's good to leave them on mulch, you get a nice free nitrogen-tea effect out of it over the rainy season, scattered about a bunch of fish oil, and looked after the pear tree and the apple tree. Oh, and trimmed the roses, since it's after President's Day. Everything is budding already! But it should still be safe.

I'm considering whether I want to make a separate cold frame for the smaller raised bed, or just use the larger one I already have. I mostly think the plastic might get torn by the one exposed corners, but then again, it might be fine. On the other hand, PVC is cheap, I've already got the glue, and I've got plenty of spare clear plastic dropcloth for a second frame. So I don't know.