Monday musings

Rousseau was an early firebrand of the enlightenment, driven from country to country. but always finding a place to land because the enemy of one king was considered the friend of the king across the border, until that king too got fed up with his shooting his mouth off.  There is an idea that what fueled the rise of Europe was that unlike other continents Europe had all these nations and a gadfly could always hop from one to the other and this afforded the gadfly not to be crushed by say, the emperor of China.

I wonder how much they knew about prehistoric man, but I think they used the American Indians as an example of how people lived before signing that social contract.  Wiki tells me that Rousseau never actually used the term noble savage, but that was along the way of his thinking.  They did have a rough form of democracy, and they didn't have to put in as many hours to earn their daily bread as the peon, but they were more subject to dying of starvation when things went badly.

Of course there was no actual signing of a social contract.  It seems to me that strong men imposing their will on the less strong was more likely what fueled the rise of civilization


That Kansas city was wiped out by the diseases of the white man but one wonders why Cahokia died out.  Maybe it was like the Mayans who whose societies fell victim to their over population.  Ancient European civilizations rose and fell.  Maybe the Indians just hadn't been around long enough to develop a written language.


This whole thing about classified information has long puzzled me.  What exactly is it?  By its own definition we can't know, but it seems like a lot of it is just inconvenient truths, guys covering their asses because they can.  What about the Pentagon papers?  Wasn't their revelation a good thing for the country?

That being said the explanation for guys keeping their security clearances is that having been in spycraft so long these guys are repositories of knowledge that can be tapped into during a national crisis.  How often this happens is unclear, but also there have been no cases of a guy with a security clearance misusing it, so what is the harm?  Of course Trump is using the revocations to punish his enemies.  Why does Flynn still have a security clearance?  The theme of the Trumpists in government is that these people have abused their privilege by criticizing the president.  Is criticizing the president treason? 


I'm wondering why the Manafort jury is still out.  It seemed pretty cut and dried to me.  It seems to me that maybe there is a Trumpist holdout on the jury sitting at the edge of the table and muttering "Fake news, fake news," over and over again, but this is just my speculation.  The pundits are saying  the charges are complicated and cases like these often go on for a couple days.  I hope they are right.

Fake news. You know in the old days if you disagreed with somebody you had to actually refute their arguments.  Nowadays you just say fake news, and then attack your opponent personally.  This is not good.