Where no man has gone before

Jeff Bezos driven by Star Trek but is driven to go through Washington.

When reporters tracked down Bezos’s high-school girlfriend, she said, “The reason he’s earning so much money is to get to outer space.” This assessment hardly required a leap of imagination. As the valedictorian of Miami Palmetto Senior High School’s class of 1982, Bezos used his graduation speech to unfurl his vision for humanity. He dreamed aloud of the day when millions of his fellow earthlings would relocate to colonies in space. A local newspaper reported that his intention was “to get all people off the Earth and see it turned into a huge national park.”

The Atlantic

Who would fardels bear

The “shock of confinement” makes the newly arrested more likely to commit suicide than the convicted.

One reason why jails have a higher suicide rate (46 per 100,000 in 2013) than prisons (15 PER 100,0001) is that people who enter a jail often face a first-time “shock of confinement”; they are stripped of their job, housing, and basic sense of normalcy. Many commit suicide before they have been convicted at all. According to the BJS report, those rates are seven times higher than for convicted inmates.

The Marshall Project

But Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t new to prison nor was he the only person to fall from the heights. At least 10 billionaires have gone to jail, some for life. Bernie Madoff may be the most famous. The list of prominent American politicians serving sentences is extensive. Many heads of government have been imprisoned. But very few have committed suicide.

The most recent major political suicide was former Peru president Alan Garcia’s.

Former Peruvian President Alan García has died after shooting himself as police arrived at his home to arrest him over bribery allegations. …

Officers had been sent to arrest him at his home in the affluent Miraflores neighbourhood in connection with the allegations.
Interior Minister Carlos Morán told reporters that when police arrived, Mr García asked to make a phone call and went into a room and closed the door.
Minutes later, a shot rang out, Mr Morán said. Police forced the door open and found Mr García sitting on a chair with a bullet wound to his head.

BBC

To what extent were loose ends rather than the fear of confinement the driving motive?

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

The 10 ships revisited

In 2010 I argued in The Ten Ships that al-Qaeda was not rooted in a place but in a transnational agenda with a system of support.

Neutralize the intellectual appeal of radical Islam, topple the rogue regimes, and ease Western dependence on oil and you win the war. Yet their centrality, and even their existence is what the politicians constantly deny.
Bill Kristof of the New York Times does his best to talk up the magnificence of President Obama’s strategy but only succeeds in exposing its bankruptcy. His argues that America must ‘help’ Pakistan, to invest in more schools but uses an example so unfortunate that it undermines his entire argument.

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is on visits to rural Pakistan to see fundamentalist Wahabi-funded madrassas as the only game in town. They offer free meals, and the best students are given further scholarships to study abroad at fundamentalist institutions so that they come back as respected “scholars.”
We don’t even compete. Medieval misogynist fundamentalists display greater faith in the power of education than Americans do.
Let’s hope this is changing under the Obama administration. It’s promising that the Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid package provides billions of dollars for long-term civilian programs in Pakistan, although it’s still unclear how it will be implemented. One useful signal would be for Washington to encourage Islamabad to send not only troops to North Waziristan but also teachers.

The question we must ask is if Islamism has been sufficiently defeated by America’s new energy independence and the collapse or neutralization of sponsor states in the Middle East to let Afghanistan go.

The one big question mark remains Pakistan. Pakistan was where Osama bin Laden was after all and his successors may still be nourished there today. Victory in the WoT will not be complete unless there is some assurance Pakistan has been dealt with. If Islamabad has been quieted, Afghanistan will have been safed, at least for now.

As a practical matter the pressure on the military to pivot toward “near peer” rivals like China and Russia is growing. If Hong Kong is occupied by the mainland the pressure will grow intolerable. The urgent question is: how stands the situation with Pakistan?

The China Challenge

Part of the problem with ongoing events in China and especially the protests in Hong Kong is that much of the crisis is internal to that country. The West, even the United States, has limited control over events.

Complicating matters is that the US is wracked by its own internal conflicts. The legitimacy of American political institutions is in doubt as never before. This is partly expressed in trade policy. While it would be wrong to suggest American trade policy is accelerating events in China surely it is factual to say that both crises are playing into each other.

Both nations are struggling with governance. China is testing the proposition of whether a totalitarian party can lead a great country in the 21st century. America is determining whether a neo-Aristocracy powered by fiat money can transition to as yet an unknown future.

It’s an open question which country is being destroyed by its ruling elite. Perhaps both.

The only effective American response to the China challenge is internal. It has to get its house in order if it is to regain its place as the cornerstone of the future. A crackdown in Hong Kong will lead not to a military response but to yet further stress on trade. But it will not be limited to trade. The impact of trouble in China on the global currency and financial systems has yet to be reckoned.

We truly live in interesting times.

The Scandal of Money

I am reading George Gilder’s The Scandal of Money which has so far proved tremendously interesting not in the least because it coincides at many points with my own earlier thinking as set forth in the pamphlet War of the Words.

Gilder examines money as information and asks, correctly, whether it conveys truth about the physical world and the state of human capital.  You can tell he’s going to argue for the negative.