Libertarians and Military Necessity

[dennislmay]

It seems that every day 24/7/365 you can find one libertarian or another droning on and on about how we cannot afford military overseas deployments any more [a 10:1 ratio of concern versus Ponzi Scheme social spending which is the real budget problem].

Big lessons were learned in WWII [and stretching from the days of Sun Tzu to present conflicts] concerning the transport of supplies in order to engage in war.

Modern total war would be fought with the supplies and bases you have on hand with little opportunity for resupply or build-up of any kind once the conflict has started.

Those libertarians calling for an end to overseas US bases are in effect declaring that no major war will be fought again by the US - except in North America - in effect ceding the rest of the world forever more to those who are already well positioned - Communists in Asia and Europe, Islamic Fascists in Africa, and Maoists in South and Central America.

With libertarians siding with socialists concerning military spending [but barely a peep on socialist

welfare spending] there will be no opportunity to build floating bases:

http://en.wikipedia....e_offshore_base

which would act like what was required in WWII:

http://en.wikipedia....ulberry_harbour

http://military.disc...ing-harbor.html

Such floating bases are much more expensive and vulnerable than land bases.

Fortress North America versus the rest of the world will mean continual economic and military problems leading to eventual collapse.

You can't engage in war without supplies - if you have no forward bases you have to fight your way in which cannot be done again like D-Day in the information age combined with WoMD. There is only so much you can do with aircraft and ships [no land presence] unless you are willing to engage in the use of WoMD.

For my 2 cents I will not support libertarians until they have real answers to military questions and stop pushing the socialist disarmament agenda. Why not push the defunding of socialist Ponzi Schemes first - giving time to think about military questions instead of parroting the socialists working within libertarian circles.

Dennis

[Brant Gaede]

It seems that every day 24/7/365 you can find one libertarian or another droning on and on about how we cannot afford military overseas deployments any more [a 10:1 ratio of concern versus Ponzi Scheme social spending which is the real budget problem].

Big lessons were learned in WWII [and stretching from the days of Sun Tzu to present conflicts] concerning the transport of supplies in order to engage in war.

Modern total war would be fought with the supplies and bases you have on hand with little opportunity for resupply or build-up of any kind once the conflict has started.

Those libertarians calling for an end to overseas US bases are in effect declaring that no major war will be fought again by the US - except in North America - in effect ceding the rest of the world forever more to those who are already well positioned - Communists in Asia and Europe, Islamic Fascists in Africa, and Maoists in South and Central America.

With libertarians siding with socialists concerning military spending [but barely a peep on socialist

welfare spending] there will be no opportunity to build floating bases:

http://en.wikipedia....e_offshore_base

which would act like what was required in WWII:

http://en.wikipedia....ulberry_harbour

http://military.disc...ing-harbor.html

Such floating bases are much more expensive and vulnerable than land bases.

Fortress North America versus the rest of the world will mean continual economic and military problems leading to eventual collapse.

You can't engage in war without supplies - if you have no forward bases you have to fight your way in which cannot be done again like D-Day in the information age combined with WoMD. There is only so much you can do with aircraft and ships [no land presence] unless you are willing to engage in the use of WoMD.

For my 2 cents I will not support libertarians until they have real answers to military questions and stop pushing the socialist disarmament agenda. Why not push the defunding of socialist Ponzi Schemes first - giving time to think about military questions instead of parroting the socialists working within libertarian circles.

Dennis

Fight a war with whom for what?

Because of our geo-political situation we need a strong navy to protect our coasts.

I can't speak for libertarians, but the way we are using the military today is too Orwellian for me too stomach. To a point, the less military capability we have the more our great leaders will have to use what brains they have instead of just sending in the Marines and fighting interminable wars.

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

I can't speak for libertarians, but the way we are using the military today is too Orwellian for me too stomach. To a point, the less military capability we have the more our great leaders will have to use what brains they have instead of just sending in the Marines and fighting interminable wars.

--Brant

In 1938 Neville Chamberlain attempted that approach to deal with Hitler. Do you recall what that got him?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

I can't speak for libertarians, but the way we are using the military today is too Orwellian for me too stomach. To a point, the less military capability we have the more our great leaders will have to use what brains they have instead of just sending in the Marines and fighting interminable wars.

--Brant

In 1938 Neville Chamberlain attempted that approach to deal with Hitler. Do you recall what that got him?

Ba'al Chatzaf

Who said anything about appeasement?

Where is today's Hitler?

Do you know what I meant by "Orwellian"?

--Brant

[Backlighting]

At the very least we should be charging Canada, S. Korea, Japan, Kuwait, Iraq, those in Europe, etc. for the "protection" we provide.

[basimpson22]

"Fortress North America versus the rest of the world will mean continual economic and military problems leading to eventual collapse."

[BaalChatzaf]

Who said anything about appeasement?

Where is today's Hitler?

--Brant

Today's Hitler is Jihadi Islam. Its is multiple and it is dispersed, but it is there.

Neville thought he was being diplomatic. He did not think of what he did as appeasement. That was Churchill's take on it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Frediano]

WWII provided all kinds of lessons. What % of armament flew out of Beth Steel? How was Beth Steel able to ramp up so quickly coming out of the Depression, even before the US entered the war? It was 100% the fortuitous planning of Beth Steel ownership and its employees, who struck a deal during the Depression. Instead of widely laying folks off and cutting the workforce in half, the concept of 'shared work' was instituted during the Depression. Workers shared a single job. Something was better than nothing, and folks squeaked by. And when it was time to ramp up production, they already had a full emplolyment trained workforce ready to go. They just flipped a switch and were able to come up to full production. That fortuitous fact had nothing to do with government planning or foresight. Beth Steel employed over 300,000 at its peak. The existential threat / wartime crisis mode led to enything goes wartime contracts, and the workforce that had sacrificed during the Depression wanted to be made whole, and maybe then some. And Beth Steel management became acclimated to the downhill breeze of wartime contracts. But make no mistake about it, what poured out of Beth Steel and other similar elements of do-or-die Arsenal of Democracy was crucial in defeating the Axis. It was necessary, no avoiding it in that existential threat to American freedom against meat eating totalitarian alternatives pressing the point globally. But the cost was, America stood up its own version of soft-fascism -- cozy crony relationships between industry and the guns of government, IKE's MIC. And bidness was good. And human nature being what it is, IKE's MIC has clung to the gig until it's fingers bleed, long after the existential crisis. It has been nothing but "War On [fill in the blank]" ever since. Cold War. Korea. Vietnam. Hunger. Crime. Drugs. Poverty. Agression. Terror.... Obesity....

JFK: $100B at the peak of the Cold War....Obama: $3800B at the peak of the Wars on [Hunger,Crime,Drugs, Poverty, Aggression, Terror, Obesity,Unemployment].

America's unfettered soft-fascism never stood down after WWII. It transitioned seamlessly to the Cold War. We didn't so much win the Cold War as we caught the Cold, and we're still coughing up phlegm.

We forgot why we fought WWII: to defend American and world freedom against Totalitarianism. And yet today, in America, we are lurching every year closer to a centrally planned, command and control 'The Economy[sic]' governed from DC. If the Greatest Generation knew that their clueless children were going to someday willingly surrender America internally to the bereft of freedom ideas promulgated by the same German philosophers that drove Germany insane, would they have bothered to send 400,000 of themselves into a meatgrinder to prevent it?

They would have never believed it.

Today, I have to wonder; even with all those bases overseas, what is going to feed them? The biggest $100 billion valued IPO capital attracting excitement this year was Facebook...who employ 3200 in maintaining a self-subscribing marketing data collection platform aimed at a nation of happy consumers. Some fraction of that 3200 work at making bitmaps dance. The rest are monetizing marketing data and selling ads that push boner medicine to Boomers. We going to war with that to fuel the next Arsenal of Democracy?

Or maybe the next arsenal is silicon based, not iron and steel. Yeah, that like helps the analysis.

We better hope that the next war is based on financial engineering, period. Except that we've managed to empire build ourselves into financial oblivion.

America could afford to be AMerica when America was America, and still growing as part of 2D surface growth paradigm that is rapidly coming to a close. JFK almost bootstrapped us into a 3D growth paradigm, but Nixon's jealosy over JFK's flagship program killed it even as it was exploding off the surface of the earth. (The Shuttle spent the next 30 years travelling no farther off the planet than DC is from NYC, idling, looking for a mission that would never come.) There is no reason that we aren't walking outside tonite, looking up, and showing our children the lights of the new colonies on the Moon; that was the only high ground that ever mattered.

The choice to not be doing that was purely political, not technological. So what did we get instead? We're spending $3800B/yr these days in an end game, a 2D cul de sac, going nowhere and jockeying for position as we try to downshift to stasis without the clutch. As we hit the brakes on our 2D surface development growth wave(that drove mankind for two thousand years), without transitioning to a 3D development growth paradigm, all the economic opportunities have slammed into the purely intellectual end of the spectrum, and no longer generate broad economic opportunity. (Facebook employs 3200, Beth Steel once 300,000...) Humanity is not adjusting to this nearly fast enough to avoid massive displacement and a sinking level of prosperity. It has created a rats on a sinking ship end game, directly from our lack of vision.

The only foreign bases that would have helped were on the Moon and eventually Mars and beyond. JFK's Moon program wasn't about 12 sets of footprints on the Moon. It was about re-invigorating gradient all the way back to Bethpage, NY, Huntsville, Al, Los Angeles, CA, Houston, TX, and Cape Kennedy, FL.

Maybe 1% of Americans even know what gradient is. It is not just an old fringe engineering school joke (Gradients drive everything.) That joke is kind of funny only because it is absolutely true. Life itself depends on gradient.

Think of gradient as a difference in something with respect to something else. Light/dark. Cold/hot. High/Low. Without gradient, everything is exactly the same everything. Stasis is a total lack of gradient, and is another word for death. It drives all fundamental process in the universe, and that includes not just human biological life, but economies as well.

Negative events, like wars and natural disasters, create gradient to drive economies. JFK's Moon Program was an example of a positive gradient restoring event. It created a gradient of opportunities all the way from the pointy end of exploration all the way back to the factories that serviced the factories that serviced the factories...

Restoration of gradient is not the most radical idea floating around these days; the most radical idea is that mankind can somehow target stasis and survive the attempt. And in a fundamental way, the various totalitarian movements -- the attempts to marshall mankind into an orderable colony of bees under a central control -- is the response of existentially terrified children to the end of the dirt simple 2D growth paradigm on earth. Panicked German philosophers from the 1800s, freshly sobered by the warnings of Malthus and decades before Kitty Hawk, saw no alternative but to marshall all of mankind and target stasis in a new, manageable end game.

They were wrong; stasis is death. And a transition to a 3D growth paradigm is doable. We just needed to choose to do it. We lacked the vision, because on average, we're average. And so we've chosen the rats on a sinking ship end game, and we're living it.

[dennislmay]

Who said anything about appeasement?

Where is today's Hitler?

--Brant

Today's Hitler is Jihadi Islam. Its is multiple and it is dispersed, but it is there.

Neville thought he was being diplomatic. He did not think of what he did as appeasement. That was Churchill's take on it.

Ba'al Chatzaf

The difference between peace on paper [meaningless] versus peace in reality. People want to believe lies that will prevent them from having to think or act [which involves work]. Neville Chamberlain stands out as an easy example of appeasement - video of him waiving peace paperwork in a giddy schoolgirl-like manner only reinforced that he didn't have a clue what he was dealing with though there were plenty of clues. Neither Britian nor the US were prepared. Hitler saw the British and French as weak once they kept appeasing. In more recent examples of appeasement Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are both said to have taken ever bolder steps following US appeasement or inaction following previous provocations. Iran and North Korea have turned appeasement baiting into an artform.

Dennis

[dennislmay]

And a transition to a 3D growth paradigm is doable. We just needed to choose to do it. We lacked the vision, because on average, we're average. And so we've chosen the rats on a sinking ship end game, and we're living it.

I agree that the most important goal of our time should be the industrialization of space. Once geometric growth is unleashed the corruption of stagnation can be replaced.

Dennis

[Frediano]

My father was a WWII vet, and was incensed over Vietnam, just incredulous. He(and I to this day)don't understand why a nation enters a war, commits all those resources into harms way and yet, under goofy rules of half-war managed far away in DC, only in the end to claim "Never mind, we didn't really mean it, what were we thinking?" If that outcome was acceptable, then never waging the war to begin with was acceptable, and 50000+ American heros on a wall in DC is criminal. It begins to look as if the purpose of Vietnam was to wage war, period; a reason for being for IKE's MIC to be at war levels of production.

That was not the case with WWII; losing that conflict was not acceptable. We can't even imagine what life would be like today as a global Germania.(Fortunately, our European scientists built the bomb first.)

And that is why a nation of 140 million put 16 million in uniform and sent 400,000 to their graves. But dammit, they didn't do that just so their clueless kids could gleefully sign up for Totalitarian-Light, else why bother?

Fortunately, our kids are reading The Hunger Games, so there is some hope of coughing up the phlegm left over from the Cold War.

[dennislmay]

My father was a WWII vet, and was incensed over Vietnam, just incredulous. He(and I to this day)don't understand why a nation enters a war, commits all those resources into harms way and yet, under goofy rules of half-war managed far away in DC,...

The whole story behind the various proxy wars may not be preserved for history depending on who has had a chance to filter it. We do know that destroying history whenever possible is a passion and necessity for some political groups. We also know that when the Soviets collapsed a number of dirty secrets came out which contradicted the narrative the media had spun on a number of issues.

The Cold War had external and internal enemies - the internal enemies is something the American people have never fully appreciated - the details of which are unlikely to come out in my lifetime if ever.

It is my opinion that one of the great weaknesses of the libertarian movement is its inability to understand and deal with internal enemies undermining its message and using libertarians as a tool for socialism.

Dennis

[Brant Gaede]

There are always enemies. They exist on a hierarchy of objective threats. The basic danger is they steal our good stuff and give it to bad guys, like atomic bomb secrets.

--Brant

[Frediano]

Brant:

That's the basic danger. But another is, because of our open borders, non-police state, and wide open campuses(attributes we cherish/enjoy, but which were usable to attack us so they did), a lasting danger is they infiltrated the tiny(and somewhat receptive for some goofy reason)Ivies, over-ran them, and sent intellectually crippled robots out to disproportionately man the machinery of state and academia and spout nonsense anathema to freedom. These tiny places are too inbred, too easily infiltrated and overwhelmed, too elitist and authoritarian. They are like mandrels of thought. The indoctrination is hamfisted and thick and at least partially effective.

Assuming that we were once in a global conflict with smart, totalitarian leaning competitors, what was it about any of the above that was going to prevent them from deliberately attacking us at these tiny chokepoints?

Look at the credentials on the USSC. Look at the last two cookie-cutter former radical Princeton feminist nominies to the court, remarkably nominated by a man who shares pillow talk with a ... former Princeton radical feminist. Princeton has about 4000 undergrads; it's like a HS. The USSC really needs two former Princeton radical feminists on it? Seriously? Our nation craves that much inbred thought from these mandrels of PC right-thinking?

Look at the credentials of the last several presidents. Look at the credentials in Congress, and throughout all the machinery of state. Look at the faculty of non-Ivies. These little clubs have a dispproportionate to their size representation in the machinery of our nation, and our once enemies would have been fools to leave them unmolested. That attack might be decades over, but it left a self-propagating residue of instructed robot goo, endlessly respouting the same left wing gibberish.

We screwed up. We study cancer freely on universities, but we don't advocate actually giving everybody cancer. In the context of a free America, so should have been the study of Marxism and similar themes anathema to freedom; restricted to a search for the cure. We carried a theme too far when 'complete academic freedom' embraced the active selling of ideas totally anathema to freedom. Our once enemies must have been laughing their asses off at America. That is, right up until the time they started eating their shoes.

What would have possibly stopped that once deliberate attack? Our borders? Our non-police state? Our open campuses and devotion to complete academic freedom? The well wishes of our adversaries, and their desire for us to remain as a successful nation living in freedom? (We ran that experiment, and they couldn't build the walls high enough...) We relished our freedom, and they used that against us, and we let them. When their slop was being pushed on those campuses, not nearly enough laughter met them.

"You want to spread cancer in a healthy nation? The Hell you say..."

regards,

Frediano

[syrakusos]

We also know that when the Soviets collapsed a number of dirty secrets came out which contradicted the narrative the media had spun on a number of issues.

One of the reasons that Ayn Rand disliked Ronald Reagan is that she denied that the USSR was a threat to the USA. "East Minus West Equals Zero." If we stopped supporting them, they would collapse. Ayn Rand argued from first principles but the empirical facts to support her thesis appeared after all. The USSR was a hollow shell, capable of crushing Hungary, hard-pressed to hold Afghanistan (as who has not been?), and totally unable to threaten the United States.

The muscle-mystics in our government admired Hitler and Stalin, and so, took their propaganda seriously. Our fear of the USSR was based on the very same altruist-collectivist ideas.

A free and open capitalist society has nothing to fear from the mystics of muscle.

[syrakusos]

... because of our open borders, non-police state, and wide open campuses(attributes we cherish/enjoy, but which were usable to attack us so they did), a lasting danger is they infiltrated ... in a global conflict with smart, totalitarian leaning competitors ... radical Princeton feminist ... These little clubs ... the same left wing gibberish. When their slop was being pushed on those campuses, not nearly enough laughter met them.

How come we do not have a functioning conspiracy? Why is freedom on the defensive? How did they get so powerful? Can anything on Earth stop them?

"Once upon a time, there was a perfect society. (Garden of Eden; or communalist hunter-gatherers; or 19th century capitalists). But, the Devil came in. (The serpent; property; socialism.) And we lost it because it was stolen from us. (Here we are.) But if we all pull together, we can create a wonderful new world, not for ourselves, but for our descendants."

In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer says that a mass movement can exist without God, but no mass movement can succeed without a devil.

How come we do not have a functioning conspiracy?

The leftists of Occupy and the Academy claim that we do. They see the globalist capitalist hegemony as their Devil. And so "we" opppose "them" over whose devil really rules the world. Makes you wonder if the real rulers are not pulling the strings on both sets of puppets...

[Brant Gaede]

One of the reasons that Ayn Rand disliked Ronald Reagan is that she denied that the USSR was a threat to the USA. "East Minus West Equals Zero." If we stopped supporting them, they would collapse. Ayn Rand argued from first principles but the empirical facts to support her thesis appeared after all. The USSR was a hollow shell, capable of crushing Hungary, hard-pressed to hold Afghanistan (as who has not been?), and totally unable to threaten the United States.

The muscle-mystics in our government admired Hitler and Stalin, and so, took their propaganda seriously. Our fear of the USSR was based on the very same altruist-collectivist ideas.

A free and open capitalist society has nothing to fear from the mystics of muscle.

It's not often that I disagree with everything in one of your posts. Can you document her attitude about Reagan?

--Brant

[Theodore]

Disband the Military. Can anyone name a one twelve month time frame in which we have not had a major military action. I am of the opinion that governments are not a necessary evil (thomas paine) but instead are only evil. End war, Disband government.

[dennislmay]

...The USSR was a hollow shell, capable of crushing Hungary, hard-pressed to hold Afghanistan (as who has not been?), and totally unable to threaten the United States.

How could those silly military intelligence people be so confused - after all Rand was a military expert right? Just because they killed tens of millions of their own people, had tens of thousand of nuclear weapons, were spreading violent revolution and terror in dozens of countries killing millions more, and had plans to take over more countries doesn't mean that they are any threat to the United States - as long as we are protected by philosophy. It is true that their collapse would have been much easier to bring about had they not had support from socialists in the West. That is a truism - all socialist systems rely on productive victims to continue. The most productive victims were in the West and the West was/is heavily infected with socialists happy to help them.

Rand viewed Reagan as her own caricature of what religious people are all about - forgetting in full context that people are full of compartentalizations.

Dennis

[Frediano]

... because of our open borders, non-police state, and wide open campuses(attributes we cherish/enjoy, but which were usable to attack us so they did), a lasting danger is they infiltrated ... in a global conflict with smart, totalitarian leaning competitors ... radical Princeton feminist ... These little clubs ... the same left wing gibberish. When their slop was being pushed on those campuses, not nearly enough laughter met them.

How come we do not have a functioning conspiracy? Why is freedom on the defensive? How did they get so powerful? Can anything on Earth stop them?

"Once upon a time, there was a perfect society. (Garden of Eden; or communalist hunter-gatherers; or 19th century capitalists). But, the Devil came in. (The serpent; property; socialism.) And we lost it because it was stolen from us. (Here we are.) But if we all pull together, we can create a wonderful new world, not for ourselves, but for our descendants."

In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer says that a mass movement can exist without God, but no mass movement can succeed without a devil.

How come we do not have a functioning conspiracy?

The leftists of Occupy and the Academy claim that we do. They see the globalist capitalist hegemony as their Devil. And so "we" opppose "them" over whose devil really rules the world. Makes you wonder if the real rulers are not pulling the strings on both sets of puppets...

We had, we don't have; the attack w as not by the current generation of once instructed robots, pouring out of those mandrels of thought, regurgitating their instruction. That is just the phlegm left overfrom the Cold War. The attack was by those who once instructed those who once instructed the current crop of self-replicating instructed robots. What is left is not 'functioning' -- for sure. But is still spouting gibberish anathema to freedom, and still must be coughed up.

America is like a sick patient that took half of its anti-biotics after an infection. 1989, the Berlin wall collapses. Two years later, Carville is selling America "It's the Economy, Stupid!" -- as if centrally planned command and control 'the economy' running had just been demonstrated to be a great thing to move towards. And America kept coughing.

And is still coughing. That phlegm just won't give it up.

[BaalChatzaf]

Disband the Military. Can anyone name a one twelve month time frame in which we have not had a major military action. I am of the opinion that governments are not a necessary evil (thomas paine) but instead are only evil. End war, Disband government.

Since the time of the Korean War, the U.S. has been fighting "The Forever War". It is as though we need an enemy in order to survive.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

...The USSR was a hollow shell, capable of crushing Hungary, hard-pressed to hold Afghanistan (as who has not been?), and totally unable to threaten the United States.

How could those silly military intelligence people be so confused - after all Rand was a military expert right? Just because they killed tens of millions of their own people, had tens of thousand of nuclear weapons, were spreading violent revolution and terror in dozens of countries killing millions more, and had plans to take over more countries doesn't mean that they are any threat to the United States - as long as we are protected by philosophy. It is true that their collapse would have been much easier to bring about had they not had support from socialists in the West. That is a truism - all socialist systems rely on productive victims to continue. The most productive victims were in the West and the West was/is heavily infected with socialists happy to help them.

Rand viewed Reagan as her own caricature of what religious people are all about - forgetting in full context that people are full of compartentalizations.

Dennis

Most of the "socialists in the west" are actually crypto-socialists and crypto-communists. I'm not sure about Europe and Israel--especially Israel--but I am about this country where most of them now call themselves "liberals" or "progressives," the latter replacing the no-longer so-good former, which is to say the progressives are crypto-liberals who are in turn crypto-socialists and communists. (In the 1930s, my father was a crypto-Nazi.) They want to hide their cakes--their policy "ideas"--and eat them--actually eat us--too.

--Brant

it's "crypto-"--cowardice--all the way down

[BaalChatzaf]

The way to spot these "cryptos" is by the label they use: Progressives.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[syrakusos]

It's not often that I disagree with everything in one of your posts. Can you document her attitude about Reagan?

--Brant

The Age of Mediocrity by Ayn Rand: "Ayn Rand’s predictions about Ronald Reagan (“a pragmatist who leans to the right”) just after he took office. Her final Ford Hall address is a case-study in prognostication by philosophy."

http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/age-of-mediocrity.html

"She advocated abortion on demand and refused to support Ronald Reagan because of his ties to the religious right." Letters of Ayn Rand page 666. cited in "Was Ayn Rand a Conservative?" by Neil Parille on RoR.

In Rand's last planned public speech, posthumously delivered by Dr. Peikoff in 1982, she stated,

VOR, on The Sanction of the Victims, The Obj. Research CD, said:

In conclusion, let me touch briefly on another question often asked me: What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: But I don't think of him—and the more I see, the less I think. I did not vote for him (or for anyone else) and events seem to justify me. The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called "Moral Majority" and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling—apparently with his approval—to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.

The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Reagan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost, like Herbert Hoover, to be invoked as an example of capitalism's failure for another fifty years.

Observe Reagan's futile attempts to arouse the country by some sort of inspirational appeal. He is right in thinking that the country needs an inspirational element. But he will not find it in the God-Family-Tradition swamp.

Betsy Speicher's For Rand Fans here

[syrakusos]

...The USSR was a hollow shell, capable of crushing Hungary, hard-pressed to hold Afghanistan (as who has not been?), and totally unable to threaten the United States.

How could those silly military intelligence people be so confused - after all Rand was a military expert right? Just because they killed tens of millions of their own people, had tens of thousand of nuclear weapons, were spreading violent revolution and terror ... - as long as we are protected by philosophy. ... all socialist systems rely on productive victims to continue. The most productive victims were in the West ...

Dennis, we are going to disagree here and it is more a matter of worldview than empirical facts. At the peak, just before their collapse, the USSR held about 40,000 stockpiled warheads and about 10,000 deployed on missiles and bombers.

End Strategic Warheads Non- Stockpiled Awaiting Intact Year ICBM SLBM Bombers Total Strategic Warheads Dism'tlem't Warh

1987 7,216 2,631 1,313

11,159

27,700 38,859 4,141 43,000

http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/nudb/datab10.asp

The Natural Resources Defense Council - Earth's Best Defense

William Robert Johnston, a private researcher assembled a tremendous database of sources and reduced the inputs to convenient tables.

Sources

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/wrjp159s.html

Tables

http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/wrjp159r.html

But primary sources are scarce. However, consider this New York Times story. The USA buys old USSR warheads to put the fuel into electricity production at our own dynamos.

So, yes, the warheads did exist. ... or many of them did ... getting them here was a a different problem. As you note they killed tens of millions of their own people. But they did so up close and personal, not with nuclear weapons. We all have our experiences and maybe you have more education and work than you let on. (I see you as a redneck from Missouri whose dinner consists of the squirrels you shot with your AK-47 or AR-15 while waiting for the federal troops to assault your farm.) Myself, I worked in factories and I did a job at NASA. I trained electricians in robot operations and programming. Long, long ago a NASA consultant with libertarian attitudes told me that he thought that if the button were pushed, we might get a dozen missiles out of the silos and the USSR maybe one.

The USSR produced chess champions because no one with brains wanted to work for them... "no one" or not many, really ... I met one. He completed a Ph.D. in computer science, was recruited by the KGB -- and defected. (Boris Yuzhin Wikipedia bio here.)

The USSR was not a threat. The USA government in Washington just made it convenient to be perceived as a threat.