SWCAMBORNE

The US Government, which is the majority shareholder of General Motors, is also the arbiter of automobile safety in the USA.  Currently GM’s biggest competitor, Toyota, is having serious quality issues and the NHTSA (part of the US Government’s Transportation Department) is turning up the heat.

I don’t have enough data to comment on whether Toyota’s quality issues are as serious as they sound. But if I were a Japanese citizen reading about the timing of the recalls and that GM is owned by the safety enforcer I would be extremely suspicious.

I’m reminded of what I used to call “Caesars wife’s rule.”  Caesars wife should never act improperly but she also should never be in a position where there can even be any suspicion that she acted improperly.  The US Government has violated this principle and the Japanese have a right to be suspicious.

If the Japanese get as mad as I would about this it could develop into a very serious conflict.  Remember that the people of Central America are still suspicious of US intentions in their region, because of the actions of the filibuster William Walker a hundred and fifty years ago.

This is a story that they don’t teach to school children in the USA.  But they do teach it in Costa Rica.  I think it explains a lot about the suspicion that people in Latin America have about the intentions of the United States.

This map will be in a exhibit at USD on April 21, 2010

In the 1850’s Manifest Destiny and ending slavery were the big issues like Islamic Terrorism and National Health Care are today.  Territory was in flux.  Texas had successfully broken away from Mexico in the 1830’s and the Mexican War which ended in 1848 had increased the size of the United States by a third.  Into this mix a charismatic young man from Louisiana named William Walker set out to become a hero.  He ended up dead and in the process showed the USA to be an imperialist country.

In 1853 he put together an army and invaded Mexico.  He took La Paz and Ensenada and declared The Republic of Sonora.  Mexico fought back and he returned, defeated to the USA.  He was tried for violating the neutrality act and acquitted by a jury in San Francisco.  Next he colonized Nicaragua took over the army and declared himself the President.  He openly declared that he would control all of Central America.  He was defeated by the Costa Ricans in 1856 and rescued by the US Navy.  In 1860 he was back in Honduras trying again to take over a country.  He was captured tried and hung by the Hondurans.  You can read the whole story of  William Walker on Wikipedia but you get the drift.  There is also a book “With Walker in Nicaragua” available on Amazon of course.

This graph is courtesy of Randy L. from the AEI who took it from a JP Morgan report.

The President is going to announce today that he is sending another 30,000 soldiers to Afghanistan.  This is less than the General in charge asked for and more than the anti war left wants to send.

But troop levels are only one issue in a very complicated scenario.  As important as the number of soldiers are the rules of engagement those soldiers have to fight under.  I know a little bit about rules of engagement from my experience in Vietnam.  If our troops cannot fire back when they are fired on without approval from a general somewhere then we will lose.  If the rules of engagement are written to try to make this a “civilized war” where no civilians are ever harmed by US soldiers then we will lose.  The rules of engagement are as important as the troop levels.  If they are not written so that we can win we should bring the troops home now and not wait until we have lost another few thousand soldiers lives in another pointless war.

BTW Afghanistan has been called “The Graveyard of Empires” there is a reason for this.

This graph shows the change in number of people in the world living on less than one dollar per day for the last 36 years.

A dollar a day is the United Nations measure of poverty.  I don’t know if there is a correlation but the decline coincides with the collapse of statist socialism and communism and the growth of free market economies especially in India and China.  It’s probably just a coincidence.  But it is definitely something for everyone alive today to be proud of.  Most of the remaining people in poverty live in Africa.  What can we do about it?