I just had a 20 minute talk (that evolved into a discussion of Bush) with a colleague that has just returned from China. We compared notes, noting differences and similarities between the China I visited 15 years ago and the modern industrial China to which my company is exporting jobs.
He made a very keen intuitive observation. He noted that the U.S. was the "China" for Europe 50 - 100 years ago and that while Europe re-invented itself over the past century, the relative standard of living for middle-class Europeans has gone down relative to those of similar professions in the U.S (based upon material measurements alone - standard of living should also include "soft" factors as well like infant mortality and vacation hours and one can argue that they traded leisure for hard cash).
We were a cheap labor pool and Europe survived us. We'll have to do a similar thing with China and our current asset is managerial competence. What makes this commentary on-point, relative the the "S" factor, is that, by definition we have 50% of our people with below average intelligence. IQ scores are pretty much the same all over the world. So, what are we going to do with 150 million people that are sub-literate and unable to learn the tools of managerial competence? Enter the "McJob". We can expect more people to live a shitty existence here in the U.S. The good news is that if you are rich, you may soon be able to get an English-as-first-language maid or gardener. The bad news is that if you aren't in the upper 15% of intellect, don't expect much.
I've made the exact argument that the author did, namely, how do you explain an act of corruption that has 5 interconnected parts, each of which only contributes a fraction of the corruption, to a person with an IQ of 99 or less? The simple answer is you can't.
My conclusion is that things will have to get so bad that it becomes obvious to almost everyone that we have a huge problem. That should happen in Shrub's 2nd term, unfortunately. I drew a parallel to Nixon, where nothing he did in the first term was so bad that he lost the incumbent advantage. The "left" (everyone who was not a crony, rich, reactionary or an adle-headed joe six-pack chewing up the fat fed to them) was too far from center to be an effective opponent, so we got Nixon and Watergate. Dubbya represents a worse threat because he is not the brains of the operation. One can guess that Cheney and the Neo-cons simply direct the marginally intelligent Bush into making their decisions by biasing the information he gets.
If Bush, the Media and the People never see any protestors, then expect that Dubbya will continue to act and say the things he says with utter confidence that he has a "mandate". I'm depressed now... thoroughly. Try to have a good day. |
