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November 8, 2006

Changes, insecurity, defense and Cheney's clout; John Hall victory song video

Updated 7:35 p.m.
Found it! Songwriter John Hall, U.S. Rep.-elect in N.Y.'s 19th district, sings a song as part of his victory speech, and the Times Herald-Record has video.

Video: John Hall victory speech (and song). The song is Steve Van Zandt's I Am A Patriot, sung by Hall, the former lead singer of Orleans.

Thanks to Take 19 for serving up the link in a post titled A picture is worth 1,000 words. That refers to a Journal-News picture and story.

Current Republican Rep. Sue Kelly is waiting for the final ballots to be counted before she concedes.

4:34 p.m.
The Michael J. Fox amendment: (Mo.) voters narrowly OK stem cell protections.

1:54 p.m.
Doc Searls: Mourning after:

The easy analyses will focus on the sports and war of politics. Who won which race. Who knocked whom out of the ring. Who captured the most territory. But there are other things that matter. For example, 600,000 dead in Iraq since the American military occupation began. The problem here isn't just that we botched the job enormously. It's that there are other jobs we'll botch again no matter who's in charge, if we don't change the way we make war, keep peace and understand who and what our enemies are. On the latter, "Terrorists" doesn't cover it. Here's John Robb, reviewing Fred Ikle's Annihilation from Within...

The language is a bit dense after that if you're still in election mode, and not a terrorism expert like John Robb...

John Robb was a mission commander for a "black" counterterrorism unit that worked with Delta Force and Seal Team 6 before becoming the first Internet analyst at Forrester Research and a key architect in the rise of Web logs and RSS. He is writing a book on the logic of terrorism.

and his band of informed commenters.

I rephrased it a bit, shorter:

Rapidly advancing technology will make it possible for small groups to threaten anything they dislike with homemade doomsday weapons. Our antiquated nation-states won't cope: some states will completely collapse, others will turn into police states, and some will be taken over by coups.

The Web reference is not accidental. Indeed, the blurb for Robb's own new book, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, explains,

Our enemies are now much smaller than that: small, ad-hoc bands of like-minded insurgents, organized less like bees in a hive than like the millions of users for Wikipedia, each with its own competing, but complementary agenda.

Put this way, it also sounds eerily like the "assault" on newspapers from bloggers, video and alt-sources. As least the analogy may make it easier to grasp the problem, and confirm your suspicion that taking your shoes off in airports is sheer voodoo.

I'm listening to the President say it is his job to protect us while I read Robb saying that's old thinking that won't work -- government can't protect you. The discussion needs to get smarter.

What Robb foresees (Security: Power To The People):

Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already...

On the national level, we'll see a withering of the security apparatus, but quite possibly a flowering in other areas. Energy independence and the obsolescence of conventional war with other countries will reduce tensions between the United States and the rest of the world. The end of oil will also force corrupt states, now propped up by energy income, to make the reforms they need to be accepted internationally, improving life for their people.

Perhaps the most important global shift will be the rise of grassroots action and cross-connected communities. Like the Internet, these new networks will develop slowly at first. After a period of exponential growth, however, they will quickly become all but ubiquitous--and astonishingly powerful, perhaps as powerful as the networks arrayed against us...

Many thanks to clueful Doc for beginning this new conversation.

Rumsfeld out: NBC's Chris Matthews is saying the President broke with the Vice President in this decision. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have been joined at the hip for decades. The new Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, is part of his father's team. Gates at Wikipedia:

Robert Michael Gates (born September 25, 1943) is an American intelligence official. He served for 26 years in the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council. Under President George H.W. Bush, Gates served as Director of Central Intelligence. After leaving the CIA, Gates wrote his memoirs and became president of Texas A&M University, serving on several corporate boards....

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 7:34 PM | Permalink