A Hermit without a Hermitage Is Just a Homeless Guy

Atrios-Eschaton-Black, strolling once more onto the field where self-described liberals take shots at the side of the barn . . . and miss wildly.

At heart really is the knee-jerk libertarian reaction against government infringement on some nebulous concept of "liberty." Drop me in the middle of the desert and I am truly free, though it's not really the kind of freedom I am interested in.

From people who whine and cry and rend their garments all day about media misrepresentation and conservative strawmen and the lyingest liars who ever lyingly lied and the rest of their on-again, off-again ideological enemies, this is an awfully tawdry effort.

Since every internet kook and law professor with an axe to grind and a fetish for Confederate glory claims the mantle of libertarianism these days, I'm going to speak, in libertarian fashion, well and only for myself. It's not "some nebulous concept" of liberty, lion laying down with the lamb, wars ended and mankind perfected, that I'm looking for. Let's leave the perfectability of man to modern liberalism and the coming of the meshiach to their conservative buddies. Rather, it's that governments use incremental, innocuous intrusions on the private spheres of their citizens to consolidate unnecessary, destructive, and tyrannical powers. What motivates me to oppose government interventions in my life is not at all my belief that I as an individual represent the perfect decision-making unit; that left alone I am infallible; that in no instance can a collectivity deliver a benefit to its members. It's rather the long history of our government and every other government to fall at some point into the hands of venal, incompetent, evil, or simply dangerously well-meaning men who will take the structures of support, dependence, and census and twist them to the purposes of tyranny. Atrios, meet the no-fly list. No-fly list, meet Atrios.

Liberal technocrats and New Deal aficionados endlessly pimp for a society run by people like themselves, ruled by a beatific FDR, united in peace and brotherhood and prosperity, debating only on merits, always telling their superiors when they've screwed up, always fessing up to the public when that's the case. Needless to say that's not the way things happen. The burden of proof is not on the private citizen to show that some new law is onerous, but on the government to show that it is not. It isn't the theory of the Last Man that drives libertarians toward a Utopia, but the corruptibility of man that drives libertarians to oppose John Q. Manager having access to a database of my DNA, retinal pattern, bank records, and porno preferences.

Now Atrios says:

Having said that, I do think libertarians could find their calling by focusing on stupid state and local laws, and I don't mean symbolic but not especially important things like seatbelt laws and smoking bans. Small businesses do face rather onerous regulations and taxation, often applied by corrupt and/or incompetent agencies, in many municipalities. There are genuine and pointless barriers to the kind of economic freedom libertarians talk about, but the federal payroll tax isn't really a particularly important one.

And of course, when that's the case, libertarians are accused of "knee-jerk libertarian reaction against government infringement" and relentlessly interrogated as to why we spend so much time yapping about smoking bans and seatbelt laws instead of concentrating on the Patriot Act and habeas corpus. It's a perfectly circular critique. Meanwhile, it's true that there are libertarians with a boner for taking the wrecking ball to the IRS, but me, myself, I'd rather take it to the Pentagon.

Other Things I Have Not Denounced Today

I have not denounced the Japanese for their shameful treatment of the Zainichi. I have not denounced Michael Bay for living. I have not denounched the European Commission for banning the wearing of neckties by employees when the air conditioning is on. I have not denounced my neighbor for his goddamn dog. I have not denounched that one ineradicable weed in my garden. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!

Jonah Goldberg, meanwhile, appears to believe that by failing to condemn this execution in another country, death penalty opponents here in the United Statesistan betray their moral and ethical unseriousness. Yeah. And by failing to praise China's one-child policy, American abortion advocates fail to demonstrate their true fidelity to the cause. Jesus, Jonah, hum us the Internationale and be done with it. Alle Menschen werden Brüder, Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt. It's all mildly silly, as you'd expect from a guy who thinks that Whole Foods Market clarifies some question of immanence and transcendence for the modern world. His conclusion is a notable catastrophe, though:

But, save perhaps in the realm of military justice or some truly grave crisis, executing to set an example for others is an indefensible rationalization of mob rule. That is what they have in China and, too often, that is what some advocates of the death penalty argue for here.

Yarbles! Bolshy great yarblocks to thee and thine! Seriously, China--Red China, Communist China, one-child China, Little Red Book China, Great Leap Forward China, Cultural Revolution China, China fucking China--is an exemplar of mob motherfucking rule?

It is impossible to parody this jive. Against our meager mockeries, this shit is the Rock of Ages.

Foodie Friday VI

Whole fish used to be the provenance of serious fish markets and seafood purveyors, but now even your local Fascist Foods carries excellent, fresh, whole fish. Outside of great sushi and sashimi--which you're never gonna make at home, so put down the bamboo rolling mat and the sub-quality tuna, sensei--the best way to enjoy the full, natural flavors of seafood is too cook it whole and to lock in the moisture. A striped bass, a few slices of lemon, salt, pepper, and a parchment paper envelope under the broiler will certainly do the trick. For something more refined, though, try this:

Whole Trout Baked in Salt

The traditional fish for this dish is red snapper, but a three-pound snapper requires about six pounds of salt. I like to use a smaller, delicate fish like lake trout or striped bass. Here, the most important part of cooking is the selection of ingredients. Your fish should be shiny and wet-looking, but not slimy. It should smell like water, not "fish." Ocean fish are easier here: they'll have a residual smell of the ocean on them. Freshwater is subtler--a slightly sweet crispness, almost undetectable. The eyes should be clear. Never buy a fish with cloudy eyes.

You'll want your fish "prepared." That means cleaned and scaled, guts and gills removed, and the spine snipped out (along with the bones). You can do this at home, but it's a pain and a mess. Have your fishmonger snip the fins, but make sure he leaves the tail and head on.

As for your salt, you'll need two kinds. Kosher salt for the volume, and sea salt for the flavor. You'll need about two pounds of salt per one pound of fish. You'll want to use a slightly coarse grind in both cases.

whole, prepared trout (or substitute bass or other small, white fish)
slightly coarse kosher salt
good coarse sea salt
white pepper
lemon

Rinse the fish inside and out, then pat dry. Season the interior lightly with sea salt and freshly ground white pepper. Set aside.

Fill the bottom of a deep ceramic dish with about a half-inch kosher salt. Then cover that salt entirely with a thin layer of sea salt. Lay the fish in, closed. Press it down lightly into the salt. Cover the fish with a light layer of sea salt. Then cover it all with another inch or so of salt. Pat down firmly around the fish. It's all right if the tail is exposed, but try to avoid even that. The key here is to make sure the at the flesh of the fish isn't exposed to the salt casing. The final product will have the flavor and aroma of salt, but won't actually carry a "salty" taste.

Bake the fish in an oven pre-heated to 425: 15 minutes for the first pound, 10 for each pound thereafter.

Remove the fish from the oven and let it rest for five minutes or so. It will continue cooking in its salt crust. Then gently brush off the top layer of salt, crack open the shell that will have formed around the fish, and very, very gingerly remove the fillets. The head will probably fall off. Don't worry about it. Plate your fillets, dress with a light squeeze of lemon and one more twist of white pepper.

If There Were No God, We Could Paaar-TAY!

In today's Washington Post, Michael Gerson becomes the first person ever--literally, the first human being in the entire history of mankind, from cave to caravan to Chrysler Building, from cuneiform to cursive, from swerve of shore to bend of bay--to make the entirely novel, unique, unprecedented, never-before-seen-or-heard, revolutionary, expeditionary, transmigratory, antidisestablismentary argument that in the absence of god there can be no morality.

Oy vey is mir. I know the joy of becoming a sinecured columnist is the freedom to phone in any old nonsense, and I don't begrudge any man his right to make a good living on 2500 words a week or less. If I could weasel my way into that business, let me tell you, gentle readers, you'd see a lot more chin-stroking about how to get responsibly out of Iraq, a lot more tuned-down phraseology (think: "dependence on foreign oil"; think: "how to strike a balance between security and liberty"). It is every American's inalienable right to make money in whatever scam presents itself best to his abilities.

Nonetheless. Quality may be a debased quality these days, especially in entertorializing, but I can't yet believe that Fred Hiatt and the gang don't suffer some vestigial embarrassment at finding their paper polluted with the kind of writing that would get the very last actual heterosexual in the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church kicked out of the seminary. For thousands of years, the exact nature and origin of our moral sentiments has been food for philosophy, and curiously enough, even in socities without explicit written warning from Yahweh that murder is wrong, murder is frowned upon. Or consider an opposite case. In the Western tradition, suicide is a moral nadir--a mortal sin, in the Catholic tradition--that might very well condemn a soul to eternal damnation and torture. In Japan, it's totally cool, fellas; it can be a rational, in fact honorable, decision: dignified, reasonable, acceptable, and without moral taint. Consider likewise that in our own western antiquity, classical civilization existed under a pantheon of explicitly amoral deities, upon whom any petty human notion of right and wrong exerted no influence, carried no weight, held no argument, and mostly found itself the butt of cruel, godly jokes as Zeus and the gang went right on warring and raping and carrying on with their loud music high and late into the night. Consider the oldest question in the God-is-Just, monotheistic tradition: Why, if god is good and just, does he cause suffering? I seem to recall a book on that very subject.

Moral sentiments have many fathers. There are the biological imperatives of a social organism. There are the necessities of cooperation for physical and social survival. There's the reciprocity inherent in mutual self-interest. There are many millennia of cultural norms, inherited ideas, socialized prejudices, taught stigmas. Many, many, many writers and thinkers have treated these subjects elaborately, thoroughly, at great length, with with, humor, delicacy, audacity, genius, madness, and brilliance. Yet with all the resources of research at his fingertips, and an army of editorial interns yearning for a wink and a nod, he was unable to locate a single one. From Democritus to Dawkins, from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Arnold Schwarzenegger, history's great moral philosophers have nothing germane to offer. Our Gerson finds not a soul to gainsay his second-rate claims.

They Had To Pick Him Up With A Shovel

In Conrad's The Secret Agent, a book much on my mind of late, and necessary reading for anyone who wants to understand our present moment, Verloc, the secret agent of the title, a workingman agent provacateur and occasional police informant, is drawn into a bombing plot by his employers at the Russian embassy. Unable--or just too lazy--to find anyone to plant the bomb he acquires, and of course unwilling to do it himself, he sends his wife's retarded brother, who idolizes him, to do the job. Needless to say, the poor boy blows himself up. Mrs Verloc, who married this man only to provide for and support her beloved brother, goes mad with grief. She tells him he is a murderer and that he killed the boy. Even for the domestically pacific Mr Verloc, this is too much, and he petulantly, viciously retorts:

"And when it comes to that, it's as much your doing as mine. That's so . . . You may glare as much as you like. I know what you can do in that way. Strike me dead if I ever would have thought of the lad for that purpose. It was you who kept on shoving him in my way when I was half distracted with the worry of keeping the lot of us out of trouble. What the devil made you? One would think you were doing it on purpose. And I am damned if I know that you didn't. There's no saying how much of what's going on you have got hold of on the sly with your infernal don't-care-a-damn way of looking nowhere in particular, and saying nothing at all. . ."

And that, needless to say, is the President's take on the whole Iraq War.

Yellow Peril

It's true, as Robert Farley says, "that a conflict with China over Taiwan is plausible, and that if it happens, the Chinese will contest the skies for at least a while." Nevertheless, I feel I should rejoin that I'd rather it take place over the Gulf of Mexico, say, so I could at least pretend we didn't start it.

Dolchstosslegende

"Then cometh he to his disciples, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners." Or, if you're caught up in the tenebrous alliance that is the Democratic party, call yer congressman!

Yes, it goes round and round in the circle game. The usual suspects of Senatorial Donkledom and their cross-aisle cronies get into a high damned dander about the "murder of American soldiers" by foreign agents, real heavy patriotic panting. "We know what you are doing, and you must stop," cries Lieberman with all the pomp and authority of a senescent crossing guard. Hannah Arendt was motherfucking right.

And lest you think this is another concoction of the viscous, vicious middle, here's the vote count, read it and weep, suckers: Ninety-seven zip. Oh yeah. Call your fucking congressman.

Able Was I . . .

Benito Giuliani has hired Stormin' Norman Podhoretz as a "foreign policy advisor," and everyone keeps pointing out that Podhoretz is a bowl of oatmeal and a tepid cup of tea away from totally insane. Can Giuliani mean it? And if he means it, then what does it mean? Ezra Klein, for instance, asks:

So are we to understand that Giuliani would, on day two of his presidency, dispatch the bombers to Tehran? Given Giuliani's utterly nonexistent foreign policy record, these personnel decisions are about all we have to go off of. And if this is the sort of advisor Giuliani is choosing to hire, why should we assume he's anything but aching for war with Iran?

Let me suggest that the reason we should assume "anything but" is that Giuliani is basically an ignorant, cryto-mobbed-up goomba stooge, and that his penchant for violence and destruction is not restrained by such meager considerations as what country it occurs in. He's the sort of guy whose claim to fraternity fame is not that he's fucked the hottest girl on campus, but that he will fuck anyone. Whether or not he has is another thing entirely. His notoriety with the brothers is based on his willingness to express full erectile function at the mere presence--the mere prospect of a presence--of anything with two legs, a vagina, something resembling a torso, the barest indication of a human face.

Giuliani's foreign policy cred, such as it is, is likewise sourced not in the singular accomplishment of screwing the best piece of ass, but in his universal willingness to heave his hairy Italian cock to and fro, regardless of the particular qualities of its target. If Podhoretz, loopy from the sugar high of his daily diet prunes, yogurt, and Flomax, lets loose a new screed against, say, the Lesser Antilles, then Giuliani will be just as willing to tell us fuck yeah, he'd fuck 'er. I don't even care, yo. I'll fuckin' destroy that chick. Hellz yeah.

I am not certain that this is more or less dangerous than its alternatives. I only want to note that divining intent in dementia is always a waste of time.

Dead Weight

Via the Drunk Cyclist and one of Who Is IOZ?'s many farflung, double-secret correspondents respectively, here is what Jim "Jeremiah" Kunstler and Crispin Sartwell have to say about Albert DumbleGore, Grand Wizard of Global Warming, Plenipotentiary of Climate Crisis, Warden of the Prison Planet, Gasbag of the Global Gulag. (Kunstler, for the record, is still Kuh-RAYzy. Check this out.)

Kunstler has a point--that this Live Earth is predicated on and presupposes the very systems of energy and transportation against which its efforts are supposedly arrayed. You don't produce a 24-hour, multi-nation, trans-time-zone, simulcast, podcast, globocast, omnicast conert-rally-media extravaganza without an extant network of jets, trucks, trains, forklifts, scissor lifts, tour busses, cranes, automobiles, urban power grids, parking lots, ad inf. Your average touring band, playing large theaters and small arenas, travels with between five and fifteen 44' semis and three tour busses, and that doesn't count the 1500 cars per 4000 attendees per each performance.

On the other hand, Kunstler's Cassandra routine about our present arrangements leads him to some bad history, which leads him into some tendentious predictions. While it's true that the era of cheap jet travel and all it implies is probably passing, there is a habit among those obsessed with technology to presume a certain past poverty in global interconnectivity that simply didn't exist. "Globalism," as goes the popular coinage, bears a striking resemblance to British high-seas mercantilism, although perishables travel better these days. The Romans acquired Chinese silk. Worldwide intercourse has certainly been accelerated by the age of petroleum, but it isn't a new phenomenon. Likewise, the end of the era of zippity flights from LA to Tokyo, from Boston to Bangladore, may have seen its peak, but if our means of physical communion face a resource crunch, there's always the United Worldwide Interweb, which I suspect will bumble along even through the decline in suburban housing and the bankruptcy of an American airline and automaker or two.

I make this point because, as Sartwell notes, unanimity is the enemy of sense, and nothing so promotes it as impending doom. It's true that human activities are altering the climate in observable, substantial ways, but it's likewise true that no one is certain precisely what that means. I keep reading that climate change will affect poor and underdeveloped peoples, which confers on we white men a certain burden, a charitable obligation to ratchet down our driving, burning, consuming. And yet it seems to me that it isn't the people with relatively little to lose who are most ill-equipped to deal with potential displacements, but rather the vast, overbuilt societies of the so-called advanced nations that face crises for which they're entirely unprepared. It seems to me to be entirely possible that an outcome of global warming could be a relative decline in the world-ruling powers of the United States and its Western European allies, whereas the more readily adaptable, migrable populations of the world may see their fortunes--relatively--rise.

At the root of it, nevertheless, we don't know. The attempts--increasingly successful--to reify the supposed consensus on climate change have at their root a deeply flawed political conviction: that to combat the uniform denialism of the right, we must ape their uniformity. Yet it's the strength of science and reason that their questions aren't catechisms, and I'm deeply suspicious of combatting irrational, religious certitudes with assertions of universal intellectual assent on the part of the relevant secular authorities. Sloganeering isn't revolution. A rock concert, at last, is only a rock concert.

I Got A Bad Case Of Lovin' You

Now I'm habitually reticent about autobiographical details, but I don't think it's giving too much away to say that I grew up as the son of a hospital CEO, and most of my life was spent around the Lexus-driving parents and Jetta-driving progeny of Medical Doctordom. Yes, Michael Leeden, the MDs. Although most were white, Republican, fond of bogus tort reform arguments but not so much of theopolitical zealotry, there was a substantial minority bearing surnames of Middle-Eastern and Subcontinental origin. These men also golfed.

My father called them "the children," and it is true that doctors are a notoriously petulant breed. It was ingrained in me early on that the medical professional is really just a glorified stationary engineer; doctors just have the misfortune to oversee the operations of the notoriously creaky physical plant of the human body. The healing arts, for better or worse, haven't spawned a class of hard-working, knowledgeable, regular guys, but a class of overpaid monomaths. In other words my opinion isn't necessarily high. But this latest Terror War half-notion that gastroenterology is the equivalent of the Holocaust is a. Wee. Bit. Hysterical.


Via Mona.

Yitgaddal v'yitqaddash sh'meh rabba

Let's turn one of the Republican presidential debates into a theological debate. Then the absurdity of all of this (religion in politics, not religion) will be made obvious.

Riddle me this: How will Mormon Mitt Romney, Benito Giuliani, John "Rudy, You're Too Small To Play" McCain, Basset-hound Thompson, and the unevolved contingent of Republican Also-Rans cavilling over the finer points of the Nicene Creed and the precise moment of fetal ensoulment conspire to render "religion in politics" but not religion per se ridiculous. Because it seems to me that a lot of doctrinally insecure white guys debating the parametrical differences between Kolob and Heaven are not going to damage the reputation of religion in politics alone.

In other words: I support this plan.

No Man Takes What's Mine!

Stop it. Brad Bird's Ratatouille is about Objectivism the way Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is about architecture.

Tomorrow We Start Tearing Down the College

Now here is an interesting statement:

To ["gradually downsize our role and reduce our footprint"], Bush intends to argue that Congress and the public should look past this week's scheduled status report on Iraq and wait for the fuller assessment due in September. A drawdown, administration officials said, must be the result of the troop increase, not in place of it. "The drawdown is an effect," the official said. "It's not a cause."

It's one thing to claim broadly that success of some vague, unqaulified kind must occur prior to packing up and heading home leaving a residual, over-the-horizon force to deal with contingencies and prevent genocide, but it is quite another to suggest that this "drawdown" must proceed from the current ramp-up. But that's what they're saying, no? They're claiming that any future in Iraq must itself be effectuated by the so-called surge; that success must proceed from escalation or else it is definitionally not success; that no reduction can occur unless the prior increase has accomplished its goals, whatever those might be. This, needless to say, is a terrible catalyst for further disaster, because not only does it presuppose that a self-evidently crazy plan, the surge, will succeed on its own or any other terms, but also it obviates the most obvious, plain, and reasonable corrective to failure. Consider these parameters: the failure of an escalation requires that the escalation continue, because any other course of action would not be the positive result of that very escalation! You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

All right, Alice. Enough tea for you. You know what Iraq really needs? It needs a leader who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.

If I Did It, Here's How It Happened

Fuck. Yeah.

Maréchal Pétain met en garde contre un désangagement allemand

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Iraq's foreign minister warned on Monday that a quick American military withdrawal from the country could lead to a full-scale civil war, the collapse of the government and spillover conflicts across the region.

-The Times

Language Lessons

Observe:

Iran has been enriching uranium at Natanz on a small scale for more than four years, creating a less-enriched product that can be used for generating electricity. With further enrichment, the uranium could be used in making weapons.

That's from the Times Post. Now presto-changeo:

Iran has been enriching uranium at Natanz on a small scale for more than four years, creating a less-enriched product that can be used for generating electricity. Without further enrichment, the uranium cannot be used in making weapons.

Anyway, it turns out that ever since Dick Cheney said we were high to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, Iran has been seeking to protect its nuclear facilities from bombardment. Since we are America, efforts to fend off the saber we've been rattling are taken as provocations to further threats and actions.

Timocracy

Matthew Yglesias discovers that elites desire governance from elite consensus rather than the relatively messier competition of intersts that defines democracy. Next up: Sky is blue; Water wet.

I mean, look, a'right? American foreign policy in particular has long been governed by a uniquely deranged consensus of precisely this type, which is how you end up with the dissonance of Clinton and Obama and the rest yapping to a war-weary public about skedaddling from Iraq even as they advocate remaining in Iraq and bombing Iran. Domestic policy is actually somewhat more democratic, since interest groups can organize and advocate more easily domestically, but come on, dudes. We are all servants of State Capital, except possibly Mike Gravel, who is a servant only of his muse.

As regards David Ignatious, meanwhile, far be it from me to suggest that he is less an elitist than a douchebag, but if someone wants to suggest it, I won't necessarily disagree.

Clueless

9/11 wasn't an "intelligence failure" any more than the Iraq War, and yet we have this reified notion that it "could have been prevented" if only someone had been able to "connect the dots." Indeed, in retrospect, it is evident that had information followed a slightly different series of paths, passed over a slightly different series of desks, been aggregated in a more efficacious manner and presented by more politically well-positioned agents, operatives, and appointees, the specific plot to fly planes into the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon might possibly have been disrupted. And if the Hindenberg had been filled with helium . . .

One way or other, there seems to be a broad consensus that the path to safety lies in renovating our institutions of intelligence and defense with an eye toward some past perceived failure. This can have little salutary effect, since the next failure, such as it is, will be of a different kind. The institutional inability to create foreign and domestic intelligence services that will have significant anticipatory capacities as regards terrorism--international or domestic--won't be improved, much less eliminated, by spending "years, requiring bottom-up cultural transformation as well as top-down policy changes." The fact thn an advocate for such reform recognizes the long incubation and multiple points of influence necessary for such change, but advocates for it nevertheless, indicates just how narrow a range of thought applies to the question of American security. Consider the linked article, in which the answer to the bureaucratic impediments of a decentralized organization is a centralized bureaucracy! Long-dead horses are beaten:

In each case, failure stemmed from the same causes: 1. agency cultures that led officials to resist new ideas, technologies and missions; 2. promotion incentives that rewarded all the wrong things; and 3. structural weaknesses that hampered the CIA and the FBI and prevented all 15 U.S intelligence agencies from working as a unified team.

[...]

The FBI's law enforcement culture, which prized catching criminals and investigating past crimes more than finding suspected terrorists and preventing future disasters, guaranteed that the manhunt would go straight to the bottom of the pile.

Of course the reason that institutions are resistant to "new ideas, technologies, and missions," is that most of the time they prove to be at best wastes of time and money and at worst spectacular, catastrophic, derailing insitutional capacities. Institutional stability promotes institutional longevity, and organizational self-preservation obtains as much in government agencies as in business entitites. People's jobs and prerogatives are tied up in their institutions, and they are not going to consent, individually or collectively, to drive over a cliff without a pretty good indication that the car's gonna sprout wings and fly.

Promotional incentives that "reward all the wrong things" are pretty much par for the course (but the author is a professor, and understandably ignorant of an ordinary workplace). But we get a sense in the second part of the extract above, where the FBI's "law enforcement culture" is lamented. This being one of the most common complaints in our post-9/11 doubtfest, it deserves every howl of derision we can muster. The FBI has a "law enforcement culture" because the FBI is a law enforcement agency. A person doesn't complain that a zoo focuses on animals, an optometrist on eyesight, an astronaut on outer space.

And at long last: Perhaps the "structural weaknesses" preventing "all 15 U.S. intelligence agencies from working as a unified team," derive from the insanity of having 15 U.S. Intelligence services in the first place. That's not an argument for centralization, but an argument from utility. Decentralizing power and administration is generally beneficial in my experience, but the corollary profusion of fiefdoms should be resisted. What on earth can 15 intelligence agencies do? Are there 15 relatively discrete sections of the intelligence trades apportioned among them, or does this profusion indicate instead a nation that, since it cannot and will not ever reexamine the way it interacts with the world, has set itself on a course of hoovering up every bit of information it can find, however relevant or irrelevant, only to complain inevitably that some sand slipped between its squeezing fingers?

Absolute security is illusory, but the practical steps in its general direction lie not in haranguing CIA directors and FBI agents to adopt management-consultant pablum as daily mantras. It lies, rather, in not invading other countries, not deposing other governments, not garrisoning hundreds of thousands of troops in a global archipelago of military satrapies, and in general striving not to be such a fucking dick and bully on he playground that the other kids are inspired to take a swing at your nose from time to time.