My new favorite book of all time

The US shale oil issue has also really flipped the script as well; it's something I don't think anyone was predicting at the time. The rapidity of solar and wind's rise is another surprising thing.

I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that. I just mean that, yes, China is dominant now, and there's a certain global socioeconomic-political dynamic. But at the time leading up to the Iraq war, the world was a very different place in terms of global politics and energy economics.

It is probably more fruitful to argue over whether or not the US government anticipated these geopolitical changes well enough. But to point to things that happened later as a rationale for what transpired before seems backward to me.

In some ways, the transition we've witnessed is from a oil-cold-war dynamic involving the US and Russia/USSR to a vacuum, made by renewable energy and Asian and European economic growth. As an American, I feel like we should sidestep issues about Euro-Asian supremacy and American-Russian decline, and take a hard look at what assumptions we often make, and what it increasingly looks like is that many of the old political blocs are starting to seem irrelevant to a prosperous future. I think America has a dominant role it can play, and will, if it just starts being forward-looking instead of backward-looking.

Although we are not currently in a World War or its aftermath, and therefore our lives could reasonably be said to be better than in, say, 1917, I think this is taking a remarkably short view. There's a solid argument to be had that the life of an average human (well, admittedly a man) in the 17th century was immeasurably richer than the life of an average man in the late 20th / early 21st century, and that this downturn is because of the Enlightenment Pinker worships. Sure, life was shorter, but it's at least arguable that the quantification of life ushered in by the Enlightenment is responsible for the impoverishment of quality as a measure.

My pet hypothesis on this is that humans are wired to cope with extreme stress, scarcity, and violence. In an environment of relative peace and abundance we develop a whole host of neuroses. Most cope through entertainment, drugs, and other outlets, but some just totally flip out.

It's like what happens to hunting and working dog breeds when cooped up in a little apartment. They start eating the furniture, digging holes in the walls, chewing lesions into their skin, etc. Watch a large predator animal walk nervously in circles in a zoo.

Obviously the WW3 will make look WW2 like a piece of cake.

"Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation." 1983