Long Game

There are two problems with creating an empire: the people and the economy.

Economic weakness and a brutal regime eventually were accepted as the inevitable price of security and of being a strategic power.

The forthcoming EuU is not a re-creation of the Soviet Union.

The Kremlin intends to have the EuU fully formed by 2015, when Russia believes the United States will return its focus to Eurasia. Washington is wrapping up its commitments to Iraq this year and intends to end combat operations and greatly reduce forces in Afghanistan, so by 2015, the United States will have military and diplomatic attention to spare.

Putin’s other reason for re-establishing some kind of Russian empire is that he knows the next crisis to affect Russia most likely will keep the country from ever resurging again: Russia is dying.

Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners.  But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

FREE MONEY.

Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?

CREDIT AMNESTY

STUPIDITY INSURANCE.

But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.

UNGRADUATED TAXES

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE

The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries. But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.  These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war -- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.

The United States has capital, food surpluses and physical insulation in excess of every other country in the world by an exceedingly large margin. So like the Turks, the Americans are not important because of who they are, but because of where they live.

Climatically, the continent consists of a series of wide north-south precipitation bands largely shaped by the landmass’ longitudinal topography.

The most distinctive and important feature of North America is the river network in the middle third of the continent.

in the petroleum age in the United States, the cost of transport via water is roughly 10 to 30 times cheaper than overland.

All of the peoples of the basin are part of the same economic system, ensuring constant contact and common interests. Regional proclivities obviously still arise, but this is not Northern Europe, where a variety of separate river systems have given rise to multiple national identities.

coastal regions are a poor second compared to lands with navigable rivers.

Thus, the Greater Mississippi Basin is the continent’s core, and whoever controls that core not only is certain to dominate the East Coast and Great Lakes regions but will also have the agricultural, transport, trade and political unification capacity to be a world power — even without having to interact with the rest of the global system.

So long as the United States has uninterrupted control of the continental core — which itself enjoys independent and interconnected ocean access — the specific locations of the country’s northern and southern boundaries are somewhat immaterial to continental politics.

The border here could theoretically lie anywhere between the St. Lawrence Seaway and Massachusetts without compromising the American population centers on the East Coast

But the young United States held two advantages.

Instead, the United States could exist in relative peace for its first few decades without needing to worry about any large-scale, omnipresent military or economic challenges, so it did not have to garrison a large military.

1. Dominate the Greater Mississippi Basin

The United States solved this problem in three phases.

The Louisiana Purchase not only doubled the size of the United States but also gave it direct ownership of almost all of the Mississippi and Missouri river basins.

The inclusion of the city of New Orleans in the purchase granted the United States full control over the entire watershed.

For the better part of a century, it was the most heavily trafficked route in the country

the original 13 colonies were finally lashed to the Greater Mississippi Basin via a route that could not be challenged by any outside power.

That project’s completion reduced East Coast-West Coast travel time from six months to eight days and slashed the cost by 90 percent (to about $1,100 in 2011 dollars).

Collectively, the Louisiana Purchase, the National Road and the Oregon Trail facilitated the largest and fastest cultural expansion in human history.

2. Eliminate All Land-Based Threats to the Greater Mississippi Basin

This left a geographically and culturally fractured Canada dreading a long-term, solitary confrontation with a hostile and strengthening local power. During the following decades, the Canadians had little choice but to downgrade their ties to the increasingly disinterested British Empire, adopt political neutrality vis-a-vis Washington, and begin formal economic integration with the United States. Any other choice would have put the Canadians on the path to another war with the Americans (this time likely without the British), and that war could have had only one outcome.

But these inner territories harbored a potentially fatal flaw: New Orleans.

the 410-kilometer railway linking Mexico City and Veracruz was not completed until 1873. (By that point, the United States had two intercontinental lines and roughly 60,000 kilometers of railways.)

One, who’s going to buy their stuff if they yank all these savings out of the U.S. and if they contribute to the crash of the U.S. economy. And the second would be who in the world is going to buy all of these if they try to dump them on the market and sell them, there have to be buyers out there.

Each individual has to sacrifice a little for the benefit of the group as a whole and ultimately, to increase the pleasure each individual receives.

The response a person gives to what someone says can take two forms: the shift-response and the support-response.

Most conversational narcissists–careful not to appear rude– will mix their support and shift responses together, using just a few more shift-responses, until the topic finally shifts entirely to them. 

Conversational narcissism can take an even subtler form. Instead of interjecting about themselves and trying to initiate a new topic, conversational narcissists can simply withhold their support-responses until the other person’s topic withers away and they can take the floor.

A conversational narcissist can kill someone’s story dead in its tracks by withholding these support-responses, especially by not asking any questions.

Conversationalist narcissists will also show their disinterest in the speaker by delaying their background acknowledgments

The narcissist tries to adhere to social expectations by giving the speaker some cursory acknowledgments, but they’re not really listening, and so they throw them in there just a few seconds off.

one more form of conversational narcissism to avoid is the “Well, enough about me, I want to hear more about you!” tactic.

it brings on something of an identity crisis to see Gen X’s formative years become part of the cycle of retro revivalism

Most kids who entered college this year weren’t even born when grunge broke. If it’s too soon, you’re too old.

One of The Onion’s most biting headlines this year: “Winona Ryder finally agrees to sleep with Generation X.”

This is the sting in the rising buzz of 1990s nostalgia: It feels like retroactively giving in to those reductive media representations.

What is nostalgia good for, then?

In intimate terms, nostalgia is a glue that reinforces bonds of solidarity and shared experience

One answer is the old standby: Gen X’s endemic, possibly pathological, sarcasm.

There’s a model here for nostalgia that doesn’t wish away the distance between past and present; doesn’t romanticize the past as tragic and heroic; and doesn’t simply trivialize it (as so much 1980s nostalgia did) as trite and silly.

but it has two gigantic benefits: it handles transfers of power peacefully, and provides a pressure relief valve for internal social dissent.

there are problems

The adversarial two-party model is a very bad tool for generating consensus on how to tackle difficult problems with no precedents

At least, until we invent something better – which I expect will become an urgent priority before the end of the century.

And let me say, before I do, that the picture I just painted – of the world circa 2061, which is to say of the starting point from which the world of 2561 will evolve – is bunk.

The outward shape of the future contains the present and the past, embedded within it like flies in amber.

Let me take mobile phones as an example. They let people talk to one another – that much is obvious. What is less obvious is that for the first time the telephone network connects people, not places

So let me start by trying to predict the mobile internet of 2061.

We’re currently living through a period in genomics research that is roughly equivalent to the early 1960s in computing.

These are for the most part commensal organisms – they live in our guts and predigest our food, or on our skin – and they play a significant role in the functioning of our immune system.

A second crisis we face is that of cancer

So, to summarize: we’re moving towards an age where we may have enough bandwidth to capture pretty much the totality of a human lifespan, everything except for what’s going on inside our skulls.

To be more precise, it originated in a financial system generating paper assets whose value depended on the price of housing.

Fair or not, this perception created a massive political crisis.

This generated the second crisis — the crisis of the political elite.

The sovereign debt question also created both a financial crisis and then a political crisis in Europe.

Which narrative is true is not the point.

The American and European crises struck hard at China, which, as the world’s largest export economy, is a hostage to external demand, particularly from the United States and Europe.