Tom Ricks says we need a draft. This is nonsense. If we want to prevent stupid wars, make the country pay for them.
Since the end of the military draft in 1973, every person joining the U.S. armed forces has done so because he or she asked to be there. Over the past decade, this all-volunteer force has been put to the test and has succeeded, fighting two sustained foreign wars with troops standing up to multiple combat deployments and extreme stress.
This is precisely the reason it is time to get rid of the all-volunteer force. It has been too successful. Our relatively small and highly adept military has made it all too easy for our nation to go to war — and to ignore the consequences.
Conscription is bullshit. From the Revolutionary War to 1973, the draft never worked. The Continental Congress tried to conscript men and the states wouldn’t do it. The War of 1812 was fought by an all-volunteer military. Neither the Union nor the Confederacy could make conscription work: every such effort led to riots. By the numbers, of the 2,100,000 Union soldiers, only two percent were conscripted and six percent were substitutes for rich boys whose fathers could afford to keep their dainty sons out of the military. The rest were all volunteers.
Continue reading this post…
Presented as-is, promoted from his comment
Like almost all of you, I have mixed feelings about the police. As a law-abiding tax-paying citizen with property that needs protecting, I am in favor of a coercive force that keeps the “bad guys” in check. As a libertarian minded citizen, I am concerned always and everywhere with “coercive” forces. Long ago, Patrick had asked me to write about this, but the memories were a bit too painful at the time. They still are, but enough time has passed.
Back in 1999 I was in Seattle making presentations on a company I had co-founded to a few VC firms there. I had flown in for the day and intended to fly out that evening. What I had no concept in the world of (being head down focused on business issues and the presentations) was that there was this little thing called the WTO Meeting. This was Nov. 30th, 1999. After a flight that arrived early that morning and several stops at VC’s I was physically and emotionally drained. I was also completely unprepared for what greeted me when I stepped out of the building onto the downtown street around 5:00 P.M. Thousands of protesters, many wearing costumes were running around and there were perhaps hundreds of police chasing them. I stood on the street corner, (foolishly waiting for the light to turn green) gaping slack jawed at the scene in front of me. Up in the offices of the VC firm, haggling over financial projections and valuations, I had not one clue in the world that chaos was reigning right outside.
Continue reading this post…
Levon Helm was a musician’s musician. Raised near Helena, Arkansas, home of the King Biscuit Time, the longest-running radio show, he was raised in the very heart of what would become rock and roll. As a kid, he saw Elvis Presley in concert and Little Richard but it would be Jerry Lee Lewis‘ drummer, Jimmy Van Eaton who inspired him to become one of rock and roll’s greatest drummers.
I think of Levon Helm and the image of the magical Medicine Show springs to mind, of The Rabbit’s Foot Company, pulling into an open area with two cars and a big old tent. Once they’d been magnificent, back in the early 1900s, owned by Pat Chappelle, three railroad cars full of the last vaudevillians, dancers, musicians, comedy acts, solo and ensemble singers. Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Big Joe Williams. By the time Levon Helm saw them in the 40s, they’d been sold to W.S. Walcott. Robbie Robertson would write the song, The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show for The Band’s 1970 album Stage Fright but it was Levon’s song for all intents and purposes, for it was his story.
Continue reading this post…
Adrienne Rich has passed away. Encountering Adrienne Rich’s poems was a revelation. Here was a feminist of a different sort, one who spoke to a young man like me in a voice wise and knowing. I was then forming my own opinions of women and found in her something solid and palpable.
But it was Adrienne Rich who spoke most clearly to me of the mind of women. I gave her poems to my daughters, who loved them too.
In those days, the world was ablaze with wars and change of all kinds. The poets I loved were mostly men: Auden, Yeats, Frost, Eliot. I love them still. Sylvia Plath I’d read and recognised her brittle brilliance, Emily Dickinson’s poems were fine but unconnected to a world I knew. Adrienne Rich was a creature of her time, as was Yeats, but oh so much more.
Continue reading this post…
Miss Mary 
Will Truman 
Mali Hawthorne 
Snorkle 
b 
areawoman 
