Ever since WWII

In a recent post Andrew Sullivan asked "[W]hen did it become normal for one country to be stationing troops in the heart of another one?"

In brief: Ever since WWII. (Alas!)

We Americans have footed most of the defense spending bill for most of our regional strategic allies for over half a century now.

I'm still trying to find a map which adequately illustrates this point for Sullivan's readers' edification. This may take a little while, but for now, check this out:
http://www.nonviolenceworks.com/usmilitaryglobal.pdf

Reading this week

P.J. O'Rourke is almost as insightful as he is hilarious. Good stuff! Still waiting to find a unifying theme or some sort of thesis statement, but in the meanwhile it's a pretty good ride.

Probably I'll leave a few comments later, but for now, here is a representative sample from the first chapter about why we Americans just don't like dealing with foreign policy:

Being foreigners ourselves, we Americans know what foreigners are up to with their foreign policy—their ven­omous convents, lying alliances, greedy agreements, and trick-or-treaties. America is not a wily, sneaky nation. We don’t think that way. We don’t think much at all, thank God. Start thinking and pretty soon you get ideas, and then you get idealism, and the next thing you know you’ve got ideology, with millions dead in concentration camps and gulags. A fundamental American question is “What’s the big idea?”

Americans would like to ignore foreign policy. Our previous attempts at isolationism were successful. Unfortunately, they were successful for Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan. Evil is an outreach program. A solitary bad person sitting alone, harboring genocidal thoughts, and wishing he ruled the world is not a problem unless he lives next to us in the trailer park. In the big geopolitical trailer park that is the world today, he does.

America has to act. But, when America acts, other na­tions accuse us of being “hegemonistic,” of engaging in “unilateralism,” of behaving as if we’re the only nation on earth that counts.

We are. Russia used to be a superpower but resigned “to spend more time with the family.” China is supposed to be mighty, but the Chinese leadership quakes when a couple of hundred Falun Gong members do tai chi for Jesus. The European Union looks impressive on paper, with a greater population and a larger economy than America’s. But the military spending of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy combined does not equal one third of the U.S. defense budget. The United States spends more on defense than the aforementioned countries—plus Russia plus China plus the next six top defense-spending nations. Any multilateral mili­tary or diplomatic effort that includes the United States is a crew team with Arnold Schwarzenegger as coxswain and Nadia Comaneci on the oars. When other countries demand a role in the exercise of global power, America can ask another fun­damental American question: “You and what army?”

Ah, P.J., you just slay us with your war stories. Want more? There is an extended excerpt over at The Atlantic.

God with us

In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep through villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave. Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing”, he said. And then he was shot dead.

What Hitler did not believe...and what the SS did not believe ... and what the functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.

- David Berlinski, Jewish "agnostic"

Here is a relatively concise (1,003 word) response:

No, that's not photoshop, and yes, the notion was rather widely publicly supported within the Nazi party and the German public. To claim the pervasive antisemitism of WWII Europe had its roots in anything other than Christian tradition is to ignore continental history. Berlinski may be brilliant, but he's no historian.

Agnostics Anonymous Artfully Advertised

This one takes the prize for subtlest free-thought sticker I've ever seen.  I would assume the driver is pro-science and not quite a full-on unbeliever.  Either that, or the scarlet "A" is considered non-symbolic and the driver is a bit of a purist on such matters.

Another TED talk worth watching

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/259

Today I caught a lecture by Paul Ewald explaining how a few fairly low-tech solutions could lead to an upward spiral of public health by taking advantage of the rapid evolutionary capability of virulent micro-oganisms. I've covered some of this material before in my wife's intro to evolution text, but this lecture makes the material more broadly accessible.

Ways to "manage" the germs' virulence range from blocking waterborne transmission (cholera) to building vector-proof houses and hospitals (malaria) to reducing the potential for sexual transmission (AIDS) to designing vaccines that disfavor virulent variants (TB).
TED 2007 Conference Notes

Or, we could keep asking the Pope to keep the poor and suffering in his prayer journal.

Obamania!

The next president of the U.S. just gave his 'presumptive nominee' speech in St. Paul, MN. He hit upon various unifying themes we've heard time and again, but fired off an opening salvo across the bow of the U.S.S. McCain.

I'm proud to have supported this campaign, but remain undecided as to November.

Favorite line:
Obama disparaged those who would use "religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon."