Firstly, be aware that "moisturizer" is a marketing term with no scientific or clinical definition. For all intents and purposes, ordinary old tap water, absorbed into the skin via a warm bath, relaxing sauna or cooling swim, is a "moisturizer". That's why your skin feels so nice and soft after those activities ... at least for a while.
Secondly, you must understand that the "moisturizer" branch of the cosmetics industry is a high-stakes, billion dollar game played by a thousand vicious competitors who are all forever seeking an edge in the marketplace, and therefore consumer deception is a common, even universal practice. Thirdly, be advised that the vast majority of their research and development expenditures are focused on marketing and persuasion - certainly not on something as peripheral to their bottom line as producing a better formulation, or anything. In fact, most manufacturers devote far more time, money and energy to designing and producing an attractive container and label, than they ever do on designing, producing or improving their actual product.
As to your actual question:
Be they the $60-for-a-tablespoon-in-a-crystal-pot variety, the ubiquitous, sink-side blue jar variety, or your drugstore-brand "family size" pump bottle of white goo, all commercial "moisturizers" work in exactly the same way. They all provide a bit of water that penetrates cell walls membranes to rehydrate and plump up the outermost few layers of dead skin cells that form your epidermis. Typically, their water content is around 65%. In addition, they all contain (@~25%) some sort of grease, wax or oil to trap that water inside, so it isn't just immediately evaporated away again by your excessive body heat ... you sultry thing, you.
In that regard, the only advantage all those hundreds of modern "moisturizers" have over your grandmother's go-to for dry skin - petrolatum, aka Vaseline - is that makers have gotten more sophisticated at finding different formulations and combinations of grease, oil and/or wax that don't feel quite as slippery or greasy to the touch, once the cells have absorbed all they can, and the leftovers remain on the surface of your skin.
This is the reason why, for example, Johnson's Baby Oil encourages you to slop on their product immediately after you shower: to seal in that tap water you've just absorbed (which needs to be done within 5 minutes of showering, or it's gone), and to ensure that any excess oil you might apply will rub off on your towel and/or your fresh clothes, and thus appear to have been successfully "absorbed" by your skin. (What - did you think there was some sort of magic involved? JBO is merely a fine mineral oil with some scent added; buy a store brand and save some money.)
Some expensive products meant for the delicate skin of the face contain a proprietary dermal irritant like CEF. Such products basically inflame the dermis, which causes its cells to temporarily inflate by taking up plasma, which in turn reduces the appearance of facial wrinkles for a few hours (rather like blowing up a withered, half-deflated balloon). But eventually the irritant is neutralized by the body's defenses, the dermal irritation subsides and its cells deflate themselves, allowing wrinkles to re-emerge - thus setting up a new and lucrative cycle of product consumption.
There are many other formulations. Some makers add a preservative like paraben to extend shelf life. Some add a humectant to absorb and trap additional water for a longer-lasting experience. Some add collagen, which is nothing more than un-absorbable connective tissue, typically sourced from that rubbery skin inside eggshells; you might as well rub yourself with actual eggshells, for all the moisturizing benefits topical collagen will provide. Same goes for added keratin, which is mostly sourced from cattle horns and hooves acquired from slaughterhouses. I know: eww, right?
Some products increase their appeal by including pleasant odourants, like rosewater (St. Ives) or menthol (Noxema). Some add vitamins, in the hope they will appear to consumers as being able to "nourish" skin (hint: they can't).
Both useful and useless additions to moisturizers come and go in phases. At one time, sheep lanolin was popular; but it's stinky, and was largely abandoned when less pungent plant-based greases were developed. Chlorophyll was once a widespread addition, though nobody ever got around to explaining its benefits, or the supposed parallels between plant and skin chemistry. A few years ago, PABA was all the rage as a UV-blocking additive, until someone pointed out that the living tissue of the dermis was actually incapable of absorbing topical PABA. In fact, the only way to get it into dermal cells where it could do some good was to drink the damn stuff, eight hours before exposing oneself to the sun. Vitamin E is/was a popular addition, at least until clinical studies indicated it actually had no better moisturizing effect than any other fine, plant-based oil. And the most recent additive fad seems to be hemp oil, Harrelson help us.
BTW, dry skin isn't actually a health issue, unless it's so profound that cracks appear in the epidermis, exposing the living dermis to the outside world and all its microscopic creepy-crawlies. It's really more of a comfort and aesthetic issue. Still, if severe enough, it can interfere with quality of life, and it makes some people quite miserable.
I provide a couple of citations, below. There's a lot of good info out there, but I would recommend that readers stick to those sites offered by legitimate medical and research facilities, universities with teaching hospitals, and so on. Don't rely on general interest sites or any site offering to sell you product.
Even worse for providing dubious information and specious assertions are the commercial web pages of the retail cosmetics industry. If the link has a little "registered" symbol in its name, just walk on by. It is revealing that the first 500 or so links provided by any Google search for "moisturizers" consist almost entirely of cosmetic manufacturers' websites, rather than to legitimate clinical information. It's the same reason why the first thing one encounters upon entering a department store, is the makeup counter. (Hint: $)
Here, to start readers off, are a couple of authentic medical citations regarding moisturizers:
Mayo Clinic: Getting the Most out of Your Moisturizer
Harvard Medical School: Moisturizers: Do They Work?
University of Tennessee Medical Centre: The Importance of Moisturizing
The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics: Winter Dry Skin
SOURCE
Thursday, April 27, 2017
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
Blueprint for Learning SEO and Online Marketing
I teach people (online store owners) marketing skills. Here's the curriculum I recommend starting with. The blessed thing about marketing is that a) the actual skill curve is fairly shallow, as long as you can think with data and write fairly well and b) everything you need to surmount said skill curve is available online, often from the platform publishers themselves.
Moz - a company that publishes a package of niche tools for fetching various data about site marketing performance - publishes the excellent, excellent Beginner's Guide to SEO.
Google offers free, online certification programs in Google Adwords, their ad platform, that will get you credentials you can put on your LinkedIn profile, as well as a slightly less intense one in Google Analytics. You'll ideally want both certifications, since those two applications play so closely together.
Moz - a company that publishes a package of niche tools for fetching various data about site marketing performance - publishes the excellent, excellent Beginner's Guide to SEO.
Google offers free, online certification programs in Google Adwords, their ad platform, that will get you credentials you can put on your LinkedIn profile, as well as a slightly less intense one in Google Analytics. You'll ideally want both certifications, since those two applications play so closely together.
Similarly, getting certs in Social PPC (pay-per-click) will only make your resume stronger. Facebook offers Facebook Blueprint, fairly similar to the Adwords certification course, but for social ads.
Altogether, these will give you the conceptual background you need to be able to understand how on-site content and off-site marketing contribute to organic search, how to run ads on various platforms to stimulate paid traffic, and Analytics will (kinda) help you understand how those things fit together into your marketing mix and where you're failing with each of them.
Creative Suite you can master on your own with a million Youtube videos. Focus on Illustrator, probably. This isn't critical, but sometimes when you're making a social ad or creating a content page, you need a graphic on the fly. You'll be a way stronger candidate if you don't have to wait on the art department to make it.
Learn the shit out of Excel. Real digital marketers are all about data-informed decisions. Excel allows you to take the data from several programs and use it to highlight trends. By Excel, I really mean learn the "advanced" Excel skills like PivotTables, =VLOOKUP, =LEFT/=RIGHT, formulas (others include =SUM, =AVERAGE, =CONCATENATE), Find/Replace, Text-to-Columns, and autofilling.
Optional bonus points: a light background in front-end dev languages like HTML/CSS or JavaScript can help you when you're creating content pages and need to understand why something's not rendering correctly. It also lets you talk to the dev monkeys a little bit whenever your boss wants you to do something drastic in a client's CMS.
Creative Suite you can master on your own with a million Youtube videos. Focus on Illustrator, probably. This isn't critical, but sometimes when you're making a social ad or creating a content page, you need a graphic on the fly. You'll be a way stronger candidate if you don't have to wait on the art department to make it.
Learn the shit out of Excel. Real digital marketers are all about data-informed decisions. Excel allows you to take the data from several programs and use it to highlight trends. By Excel, I really mean learn the "advanced" Excel skills like PivotTables, =VLOOKUP, =LEFT/=RIGHT, formulas (others include =SUM, =AVERAGE, =CONCATENATE), Find/Replace, Text-to-Columns, and autofilling.
Optional bonus points: a light background in front-end dev languages like HTML/CSS or JavaScript can help you when you're creating content pages and need to understand why something's not rendering correctly. It also lets you talk to the dev monkeys a little bit whenever your boss wants you to do something drastic in a client's CMS.
Learn a little SQL - it can help you dig in and get the reporting you need out of a client's CMS when it's not data you can get from Analytics. Finally, learn to work with a few CMSes themselves - the most popular one by a longshot is Wordpress.
So here's what you do with all of that:
So here's what you do with all of that:
think of a business idea.
- Start a free Wordpress site for it
- Build content pages and customize the design - that demonstrates your writing ability and gets you a little grease with CSS
- Launch the site
- Use SEMRush to learn that you didn't make the content pages keyword-rich enough
- Do some keyword research, then rewrite them
- Specify meta titles/descriptions for every page
- Verify the site with Google Search Console
- install Google Analytics and Adwords tracking code
- Spend $25 to get $75 of free Adwords credits
- Do something similar with Facebook
- Divide those budgets in half
- Set up campaigns in each ad platform to target what/who you think you should target
- Observe the results and figure out what you did wrong
- Use the other half of your budget to improve those results
- Make notes about what changed
- Finally, export all this data into Excel and try to use some PivotTables to demonstrate how this data changed over time
Monday, April 10, 2017
Susan Komen, the Pink Ribbon, and Breast Cancer
As someone with tatas, and a mother-in-law with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, I figured I’d chime in.
Breast cancer is FAR from an easy, curable disease. We hear that if you get regular mammogram screenings, and it’s caught early, you’re practically in the clear. These are the stories Susan G Komen shares - the “For the Cure”, the Pink Walks, the I’m a survivor because of Susan crowd. There’s this guise of breast cancer being an easy-to-cure disease because of so many success stories… pushed by Susan Komen. How many Stage 1 and Stage 2 people do you hear of dying from breast cancer? You don’t. Instead, you hear that they fought it, got heavy chemo, and walked away a year later back to their lives.
Something that you don’t hear is this: “20% to 40% of all breast cancers will metastasize at some point.” Resource.
We’re told that 30% of all breast cancer patients will become metastatic in the future, spreading to other organs or areas and killing you. And metastatic breast cancer is the ONLY cancer of it’s kind that is not curable. There is no chemo for it, there is no treatment plan, there is no funding from Susan G Komen for it.
Take a few quick moments to look at what those pink ribbons pay for. The money you donate for those ribbons, in your checkout line, in the coin drop at the gas station, and walking in a pink shirt does not go to metastatic breast cancer research. Heck, it doesn’t even go to breast cancer research. It goes to awareness. You’re buying a pink ribbon so that they can make more pink ribbons, and advertise, and run marketing campaigns to sell more ribbons.
Remember when Susan G Komen sponsored the KFC buckets? Or the pink labels on yogurt containers? These foods contain chemicals that cause the cancers they’re supposedly trying to cure. Here’s a good article: Pink Ribbon Facade.
For even more of Susan’s brilliant pink washing campaigns over the years, which our donations and pink pride have paid for, check out this article.
There is a huge outcry from the metastatic breast cancer crowd, and once you’re in it, it’s hard to see the color pink as anything but an effing stain on real cancer research. It’s truly disgusting to see how many people are dying from a disease that the world thinks is curable, low-risk, and not nearly as important as lung and brain cancer.
When my MIL started her journey, she got into a lot of private Facebook groups with MBC patients, with a few thousand members. This was a little over 2 years ago, and recently, she told me that she and only one other lady are still alive from that first year.
Think of all those cured patients that Komen advertises. You’d better believe that they didn’t do a follow up on the 30% that ended up dying within the following 10 years.
And here’s one more article, though old but just as appropriate, about misdiagnosis. The statistics are so off about breast cancer survival rates because of how MBC spreads. My mother in law had no lumps in her breast, but a sore arm that kept her up at night. Because of her crap insurance, an X-ray to see what the cause was was too expensive and she left it for over a year until she just stopped sleeping entirely. Eventually, after a lot of homeopathic remedies, manages, oils, and chiropractor appointments, her chiro Dr. ordered an X ray for her and offered to pay for it out of his own pocket.
She got the X ray, and that same afternoon, saw that cancer had eaten away at her humerus to the point that if she had fallen asleep, and rolled over, it would’ve broken. And after more tests, and weeks of scans, MRIs, etc that they are now painfully in debt from, they found that it was caused by breast cancer that spread from her breastbone to both sides of her pelvis and to her arm. And now, years later, she’s living with cancer. There isn’t a cure, and though she's now a cyborg with a metal humerus, we’re literally just waiting for it to spread somewhere else.
And in that spreading is where many people, over many decades, have come back after winning their fight against breast cancer, only to die from lung cancer, bone cancer, brain cancer (which is actually their breast cancer metastasized). The lack of research, and the misdiagnosis is truly disgusting.
SOURCE
Breast cancer is FAR from an easy, curable disease. We hear that if you get regular mammogram screenings, and it’s caught early, you’re practically in the clear. These are the stories Susan G Komen shares - the “For the Cure”, the Pink Walks, the I’m a survivor because of Susan crowd. There’s this guise of breast cancer being an easy-to-cure disease because of so many success stories… pushed by Susan Komen. How many Stage 1 and Stage 2 people do you hear of dying from breast cancer? You don’t. Instead, you hear that they fought it, got heavy chemo, and walked away a year later back to their lives.
Something that you don’t hear is this: “20% to 40% of all breast cancers will metastasize at some point.” Resource.
We’re told that 30% of all breast cancer patients will become metastatic in the future, spreading to other organs or areas and killing you. And metastatic breast cancer is the ONLY cancer of it’s kind that is not curable. There is no chemo for it, there is no treatment plan, there is no funding from Susan G Komen for it.
Take a few quick moments to look at what those pink ribbons pay for. The money you donate for those ribbons, in your checkout line, in the coin drop at the gas station, and walking in a pink shirt does not go to metastatic breast cancer research. Heck, it doesn’t even go to breast cancer research. It goes to awareness. You’re buying a pink ribbon so that they can make more pink ribbons, and advertise, and run marketing campaigns to sell more ribbons.
Remember when Susan G Komen sponsored the KFC buckets? Or the pink labels on yogurt containers? These foods contain chemicals that cause the cancers they’re supposedly trying to cure. Here’s a good article: Pink Ribbon Facade.
For even more of Susan’s brilliant pink washing campaigns over the years, which our donations and pink pride have paid for, check out this article.
There is a huge outcry from the metastatic breast cancer crowd, and once you’re in it, it’s hard to see the color pink as anything but an effing stain on real cancer research. It’s truly disgusting to see how many people are dying from a disease that the world thinks is curable, low-risk, and not nearly as important as lung and brain cancer.
“Sixty percent of the 2,000 people surveyed knew little to nothing about MBC while 72 percent believed advanced breast cancer was curable as long as it was diagnosed early.” ResourceHere’s something I learned very early on after my MILs diagnosis - all of the studies, articles, blogs, and support groups created by women with metastasized breast cancer are dead. There is no survival rate. If you make it to 3 years alive, you’d literally outlived everyone in your support group, or who was diagnosed around the time you were.
When my MIL started her journey, she got into a lot of private Facebook groups with MBC patients, with a few thousand members. This was a little over 2 years ago, and recently, she told me that she and only one other lady are still alive from that first year.
Think of all those cured patients that Komen advertises. You’d better believe that they didn’t do a follow up on the 30% that ended up dying within the following 10 years.
And here’s one more article, though old but just as appropriate, about misdiagnosis. The statistics are so off about breast cancer survival rates because of how MBC spreads. My mother in law had no lumps in her breast, but a sore arm that kept her up at night. Because of her crap insurance, an X-ray to see what the cause was was too expensive and she left it for over a year until she just stopped sleeping entirely. Eventually, after a lot of homeopathic remedies, manages, oils, and chiropractor appointments, her chiro Dr. ordered an X ray for her and offered to pay for it out of his own pocket.
She got the X ray, and that same afternoon, saw that cancer had eaten away at her humerus to the point that if she had fallen asleep, and rolled over, it would’ve broken. And after more tests, and weeks of scans, MRIs, etc that they are now painfully in debt from, they found that it was caused by breast cancer that spread from her breastbone to both sides of her pelvis and to her arm. And now, years later, she’s living with cancer. There isn’t a cure, and though she's now a cyborg with a metal humerus, we’re literally just waiting for it to spread somewhere else.
And in that spreading is where many people, over many decades, have come back after winning their fight against breast cancer, only to die from lung cancer, bone cancer, brain cancer (which is actually their breast cancer metastasized). The lack of research, and the misdiagnosis is truly disgusting.
SOURCE
Monday, April 3, 2017
Choosing and Maintaining Bath Towels
Here's a little towel lesson,
So, like twenty/thirty years ago, a bunch of USA brand, union-made textile companies closed up their American plants and have since been hopping all over Asia chasing the best price. Meanwhile, American consumers have gotten used to fast fashion, where even Calvin Klein can be purchased at Herbergers for 90% off. It didn't bode well for the "linens" industry.
Sheets are doing alright right now; having quality bedding is "in" at the moment, and there were always enough people wanting nice bedding for a few companies to hang in there.
So, like twenty/thirty years ago, a bunch of USA brand, union-made textile companies closed up their American plants and have since been hopping all over Asia chasing the best price. Meanwhile, American consumers have gotten used to fast fashion, where even Calvin Klein can be purchased at Herbergers for 90% off. It didn't bode well for the "linens" industry.
Sheets are doing alright right now; having quality bedding is "in" at the moment, and there were always enough people wanting nice bedding for a few companies to hang in there.
But towels? Why do you need nice towels for the five minutes it takes to dry off your naked body once a day?
So, towel companies fall in and out of favor, change names, are appropriated by brands like Martha Stewart Home, move locations to Sri Lanka (then Malaysia less than a year later) and are, essentially, extremely difficult to identify as Buy It For Life (BIFL).
So, look for white, 100% cotton towels big enough to completely wrap around yourself. Look for stitching at the hem ends that's clean, backstitched well and with no exposed or nearly exposed edges to rub free and fray.
So, look for white, 100% cotton towels big enough to completely wrap around yourself. Look for stitching at the hem ends that's clean, backstitched well and with no exposed or nearly exposed edges to rub free and fray.
Edit: it should go without saying, but just in case, inspect the selvage edge of the towels for nicks, frays or tears, too. /Edit Do this and the basics for BIFL are nearly met!
To keep your towels BIFL, you have to take care of them. You don't have to wash your towels as often as you're washing your towels. You're dabbing clean water off a clean body. Washing them after every, or every other, or every third use is ridiculous.
To keep your towels BIFL, you have to take care of them. You don't have to wash your towels as often as you're washing your towels. You're dabbing clean water off a clean body. Washing them after every, or every other, or every third use is ridiculous.
When you wash them, wash them as hot as your washer will go, without any fabric softener EVER, but maybe occasionally a vinegar rinse, with the tiniest bit of laundry detergent and if you can, set the washer to do an extra rinse.
You may occasionally need to soak your towels in a high concentrate bleach solution, but only to get them white again. Bleach will eat away at your towels eventually. Oh! White towels because of the heat of the wash will start to fade any color you chose, and because it's easy to keep white.
Of course, you don't want them smelling musty, but that's a drying problem, not a washing one. As in, they should be completely dry within a few hours of getting wet. So get them dry in between showers. Each person having two to rotate, or tossing them outside or in the dryer for a few minutes.
Of course, you don't want them smelling musty, but that's a drying problem, not a washing one. As in, they should be completely dry within a few hours of getting wet. So get them dry in between showers. Each person having two to rotate, or tossing them outside or in the dryer for a few minutes.
Something to ensure they're dry before it's next shower. There is so much fabric in a towel, any soap or softener remaining in it after washing will affect its absorbency, so don't overdo it.
Dry them completely before folding and putting them away. Dryers are one of the worst things you can do to your textiles, so if you have the ability to sun dry them, that's preferable, even if the dryer gets them mostly dry and you Gerry-rig something on your apartment balcony for the last hour or so.
If you can't sun dry them at all, go ahead and kill it in the machine. Better to have a clean towel that will get damaged a little faster than a dirty musty towel that lingers in your home for forever.
Oh, and if you're one of those cretins who use a bath towel to dry off your bath or shower, STOP IT!
Oh, and if you're one of those cretins who use a bath towel to dry off your bath or shower, STOP IT!
The bath and shower are not clean, unless you are as anal in your housekeeping as I am in my laundry. So, that means you're cleaning your towel after every bath (or you're super-grotty), wearing down its uses. Get a squeegee, for crying out loud! Or a couple of chamois or shop towels made to absorb scads of water and get washed frequently.
And if you dye your hair or do other unspeakable things with towels, get a few specifically for that purpose and in a different color to tell the difference. Obviously, these would not be BIFL, but I think you'd be surprised how long they'll last.
For life-messes: body fluids, juice, etc., you can keep old, retired towels for those uses. All my kitchen towels are my husband pre-me bath towels I cut in half and hemmed against fraying. Only the largest and grossest messes do we need a bath-towel-assist, and then I wash and bleach the crap outta it.
For super-fun laundry-time getting your whites their whitest, try a bluing solution. It's a rinse you add to your laundry that tints the water blue. Blue whites look whiter than yellow whites (which is why so many laundry detergents have a blue dye).
And if you dye your hair or do other unspeakable things with towels, get a few specifically for that purpose and in a different color to tell the difference. Obviously, these would not be BIFL, but I think you'd be surprised how long they'll last.
For life-messes: body fluids, juice, etc., you can keep old, retired towels for those uses. All my kitchen towels are my husband pre-me bath towels I cut in half and hemmed against fraying. Only the largest and grossest messes do we need a bath-towel-assist, and then I wash and bleach the crap outta it.
For super-fun laundry-time getting your whites their whitest, try a bluing solution. It's a rinse you add to your laundry that tints the water blue. Blue whites look whiter than yellow whites (which is why so many laundry detergents have a blue dye).
So if you have iron in your water even with bleach, your whites are never WHITE, try a blue rinse and see how that does. CAUTION: too much will be obviously blue, so experiment first!
Wednesday, March 1, 2017
How to Start New (and Positive) Habit
In order to answer the question, "How do you effectively start a habit?" — first, we must understand what a habit is.
A habit is task that has become so consistently ingrained that it begins to be carried out autonomously—by the unconscious mind—such as drinking a cup of morning coffee every day.
Why are habits important for accomplishing long term goals?
Because the moment you form a habit, it signifies that you have now transcended out the window pane that normally accompanies taking up a new task.
When something becomes ingrained as a habit, it becomes much less unpleasant to carry out that task. It just becomes natural.
The reason it is so difficult to turn a productive undertaking into a consistent practice is because it is often painful to carry out productive task. If the task is drinking coffee, or sleeping every night, it is easy to turn those tasks into habits because they are pleasurable. However, if the task is painful, like writing and editing articles, getting up and going to the gym, setting aside to time to do affirmations, then it is far more difficult to become consistent.
We are hardwired to avoid pain. Pain is helpful. It instructs us what to avoid so we don’t die, and our species can continue to reproduce.
The ease at which we can establish a habit, is directly proportional to how quickly we receive our pleasure or reward, and inversely proportional to how much pain or effort it takes to get there.
99% of the things you do are habits. The way you think is a habit. The way you present yourself to other people is a habit. Whether you start books and never finish them. They are all products of the thoughts you habitually tell yourself and the actions that you repeatedly carry out. Whatever habit you have, in some way your mind believes it is serving you.
If your lazy, perhaps it frees you up from trying and failing. If you have a victim mentality, perhaps it liberates you from personal responsibility.
In essence, you are automatic creature. However, fortunately, habits can be changed.
That is where self awareness comes into play. Self awareness is the one variable in human existence, which separates us from all other species and allows us to accomplish amazing things. In our unique ability to be aware of our habits, we have the opportunity to re-engineer them and establish new ones that serve us.
For a short period of time, we can choose to use our free will (or DISCIPLINE), in the face of resistance to push past the initial window of pain, make something become natural/expected, and thus, establish a new pattern.
Now there is a bunch of conflicting literature on how long it takes to do that. I have heard 21 days. 40 days. etc.
In my opinion, that’s all nonsense and propaganda. The amount of time it takes varies from person to person. There is only one way to tell if you established a habit.
I have used this measuring stick time and time again, to determine whether I have finally established a new pattern in my life.
The answer is two-fold:
A) when it task becomes noticeably less painful to complete
A habit is task that has become so consistently ingrained that it begins to be carried out autonomously—by the unconscious mind—such as drinking a cup of morning coffee every day.
Why are habits important for accomplishing long term goals?
Because the moment you form a habit, it signifies that you have now transcended out the window pane that normally accompanies taking up a new task.
When something becomes ingrained as a habit, it becomes much less unpleasant to carry out that task. It just becomes natural.
The reason it is so difficult to turn a productive undertaking into a consistent practice is because it is often painful to carry out productive task. If the task is drinking coffee, or sleeping every night, it is easy to turn those tasks into habits because they are pleasurable. However, if the task is painful, like writing and editing articles, getting up and going to the gym, setting aside to time to do affirmations, then it is far more difficult to become consistent.
We are hardwired to avoid pain. Pain is helpful. It instructs us what to avoid so we don’t die, and our species can continue to reproduce.
The ease at which we can establish a habit, is directly proportional to how quickly we receive our pleasure or reward, and inversely proportional to how much pain or effort it takes to get there.
99% of the things you do are habits. The way you think is a habit. The way you present yourself to other people is a habit. Whether you start books and never finish them. They are all products of the thoughts you habitually tell yourself and the actions that you repeatedly carry out. Whatever habit you have, in some way your mind believes it is serving you.
If your lazy, perhaps it frees you up from trying and failing. If you have a victim mentality, perhaps it liberates you from personal responsibility.
In essence, you are automatic creature. However, fortunately, habits can be changed.
That is where self awareness comes into play. Self awareness is the one variable in human existence, which separates us from all other species and allows us to accomplish amazing things. In our unique ability to be aware of our habits, we have the opportunity to re-engineer them and establish new ones that serve us.
For a short period of time, we can choose to use our free will (or DISCIPLINE), in the face of resistance to push past the initial window of pain, make something become natural/expected, and thus, establish a new pattern.
Now there is a bunch of conflicting literature on how long it takes to do that. I have heard 21 days. 40 days. etc.
In my opinion, that’s all nonsense and propaganda. The amount of time it takes varies from person to person. There is only one way to tell if you established a habit.
I have used this measuring stick time and time again, to determine whether I have finally established a new pattern in my life.
The answer is two-fold:
A) when it task becomes noticeably less painful to complete
B) when you go to bed without doing it, it actually feels like your missing something
When you meet these to criteria, then you know it is ingrained.
I hope this helps to establish habits that will serve you and your long term goals. By becoming aware of your patterns and re-engineering them so that they meet this criteria, you will be surprised at what you accomplished.
When you meet these to criteria, then you know it is ingrained.
I hope this helps to establish habits that will serve you and your long term goals. By becoming aware of your patterns and re-engineering them so that they meet this criteria, you will be surprised at what you accomplished.
The Truth About the US Military Budget
Alright, late to this party, so I hope it doesn't get buried.
Full disclosure: as an officer in the military, I see a lot more of the organizational and budgetary side of things than most, so I wanted to share my two cents on military spending and let you decide on whether we actually spend too much.
As OP mentioned, there's a lot of metrics people use on US budgeting. Let me explore some of these issues in detail and hopefully bust a few myths, give you a historical background, and tell you what we currently peg spending on.
Military Spending - And Its Myths
Yes, the US spends $600 billion dollars on defense. And yes, that's more than the next 7-8 countries combined (assuming China's budget is honest, which we believe is not). And yes, the US spends about 36% of the worlds total spending on military.
But, as OP also mentioned, as a function of GDP, the US is at 3.3% - lower than some nations (like Russia) and a far cry from the 5.6% the US spent in 1988 near the tail end of the Cold War. Source: World Bank.
In the post WW2 world, this is at an all time low per the CFR with it having peaked at 16% around the time of the Korean War.
So which metric is better to use?
Well the issue with looking at nominal spending is that nominal spending doesn't correct for cost of living.
Take into consideration what the military actually spends its money on. You can use Table 5.1 of the GPO or this nifty Official DOD Budget Request 2017 (yes, all this stuff is public) to see the pretty breakdowns.
Per the GPO, for 2013:
Why did I bring up cost of living? Let's take a look at personnel wages and benefits shall we. Per the DOD budget request, this chart shows that:
This is further exacerbated by the fact that both China and Russia have huge domestic arms industries producing goods at domestic prices. Furthermore, the world arms industry isn't an open market - the US doesn't compete with China or Russia directly as nations only buy from other nations they trust. The US buys domestic or buys from close allies like Belgium and Germany, who have comparable costs of production. End result? The US often pays 2-4x as much for a fighter jet than the Russian equivalent because US wages, US suppliers, and US maintainers all cost US prices, not Russian prices.
As a side note, this also irks me about the whole "arms trade" statistic and how the US is the number one exporter. Sure, by dollar amounts, we are - but our goods are magnitudes more expensive. The fact that Russia and China - producing goods at Russian and Chinese prices - are even close, should tell you who is exporting more physical quantity of goods, but I digress.
In sum, using nominal spending gives you eye popping numbers, but it tells you little about relative strength between nations. If anything, it should tell you how little Europe actually spends on defense (especially in comparison to Russian strength), and that China is a lot closer to the US than most people realize.
Waste Exists - But It's a Complicated Issue
One of the top issues everyone talks about is waste. Let me first bust one budgetary myth though: use it or lose it is not a DOD only thing. It exists in all federal agencies (e.g. NASA, NOAA, etc.) because the budget is done annually. Money not used one year isn't seen again.
It DOES NOT mean you need to spend it to get it again next year - the budget request is done annually and things change based on need and what not. Admittedly though, it does make it harder to justify getting budgeting if you don't show need, so alas, the system is very flawed. Short of a congressional change to how budgeting is done though, we're in a tough spot.
Does waste in the military exist? Absolutely. Thankfully, people are noticing and paying attention - there has been a considerable shift in mindset in the past few years towards saving money. Of course this has to be balanced: you don't want to skimp on maintenance or training, as lives are on the line when things go wrong.
In some areas, waste is also balanced by operational necessity. For instance, aircraft routinely dump fuel. In carrier aviation, we dump fuel because we have max landing limits - too heavy, and we can snap the arresting gear on the carrier or permanently damage our plane. Thus, if we arrive at the boat too heavy, the choice might be to dump thousands of pounds of fuel... or jettison even more expensive bombs. To the layman, it seems like we're burning fuel for no reason - but there's a rhyme and reason for it no matter how much it sucks. (And for the environmentalists, jet fuel is kerosene based - it's nothing like gasoline)
Inefficient Spending Often Comes from Political Sources
One of the big issues with the annual budgeting is that there is little long term continuity in a field that necessitates long term planning. For instance, the new class of aircraft carrier has been in the works for over a decade - and was planned out two decades ago. And yet, funding for it has oscillated year by year.
I'll give you an example of how political grandstanding has royally fucked military personnel and arguably cost us more money in the long run: sequestration.
During sequestration, a stop was put on training new replacement pilots for the fleet. Hundreds of replacement pilots were put on hold for a year. Well, since they just got their wings in training (costing roughly $1-2 million to train, each), you don't want to cut them from the military, but you still need to pay them.
But here's where the long term effects come in: every pilot in the Navy serves a 3 year operational tour before going back to become an instructor of some sort for 3 years. Whenever a pilot in the fleet is done with his first 3 years, a new replacement pilot comes in to take his place. Suddenly, the fleet had a shortage of pilots, and too many instructor pilots with no one to teach. And once pilots are done with their commitments, a lot get out to pursue other interests in the civilian world. Talk about a waste of human resources.
But this balloons further: a few years later, that shortage of pilots means fewer pilots available to be instructors. Fewer instructors mean fewer replacement pilots. Surely you can balance out how many pilots you bring in right? But ROTC and the Academy projects how many graduates they need from 4 years ago: suddenly, you have too many pilots-to-be and not enough instructors, and the fleet may need more pilots.
I could go into more detail, but the point is this: seemingly small disruptions have BIG ballooning effects on how the military operates.
Likewise, a lot of 'inefficiency' comes from conscious decisions to save money, believe it or not. Take for instance, the fact that much of US equipment is old. In the 90s, with the Cold War drawdown, we stopped a lot of acquisitions programs. Equipment in the military is designed to typically operate in 30 year lifecycles - the notable exceptions are things like capital ships (aircraft carriers).
However, in the 90s, a lot of early to mid Cold War stuff was up for retirement - and instead of replacing them, their lives were extended.
This does, however, have an unintended effect on Operations and Maintenance - the US now has very old equipment to maintain. Some of our equipment is from the 1950s. I'm not even exaggerating - we have over 370 KC-135's, last built in 1965(!). For a long time - particularly with the Cold War drawdown - we put off replacing old equipment, but suddenly with a resurgent China and Russia, we've stretched a lot of these airframes lives out while in the late 2000's we finally sought replacements in the form of the KC-46.
All across the board you can see this happen. The F-22 was to replace the F-15 in the 90s/2000s, but was cut short and now the F-15 has had increasing costs rise to keep an airframe from the 70s and 80s flying. The A-10 was last built in 1984 - it was due for retirement years ago, but Congressmen (like McCain) have kept it alive long past their expiration date.
I hope this all gives a little insight into how a lot of spending issues do exist in the military, but the situation is far more complicated than a simple comparison of nominal spending with other nations, and how waste and inefficiency are complex issues within themselves - sometimes by design, sometimes by outside meddling.
Now, let me explain the historical precedence of US military spending and why our spending is a conscious decision, not one haphazardly done.
The Modern History of Defense Spending
Believe it or not, in the wake of World War II, the US had a major debate over isolationism. There was a major drawdown in the military, with a lot of equipment mothballed or scrapped.
Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe and in Berlin (such as the Berline blockade) and China falling to the communists were all major areas of concern. The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was the Korean War: outright naked aggression by a communist state against another state in the post-WW2 world was just too much. The US used the newly created UN (which the USSR at the time was boycotting) to form a coalition of nations to fight North Korea. In the post-WW2 world, the UN was being tested: would it be toothless like the League of Nations, or would nations actually stand up and prevent wars of conquest?
This led to a major revitalization of the US military which as you can see saw its post-WW2 spike in spending go up to 16% of GDP in the 1950s.
The necessity of a powerful military in the post-WW2 order was predicted by many. Notably, General Marshall, in his Biennial Reports as Chief of Staff of the Army, concluded before WW2 even ended that:
Even Ike, in his famed 'military industrial complex' speech - which gets taken out of context - actually prefaced that line with his passage:
We are interested in global and full-spectrum warfare. A vital part of our defense strategy, in the world of long range missiles, supersonic jets, and precision weapons, is to put our front line of defense across those oceans. Bases in Japan, Korea, and Europe, aren't just there because our allies have hostile forces close by, but also because the further away from the US the conflict is, the more layers of defense any foe has to get through to affect the US directly.
Full spectrum isn't just a catch phrase either: the US is interested in every aspect of warfare from human intelligence to special warfare to ground warfare to air superiority to space superiority.
Whereas in the Cold War, NATO allies often focused on specializing in specific areas due to their small size and lack of funding (e.g. the UK was particularly focused on anti-submarine warfare), the US was designed to be not only the bulk of conventional forces but also charged with handling all areas that other nations lacked: logistics (e.g. the US currently has over 230 strategic airlift transports and over 430 aerial refueling tankers - the rest of NATO has about 10 strategic airlift transports and 40 tankers), submarines, bombers, etc.
Even our current aircraft carrier fleet is set to 11 ships by design. Why 11?
But why you ask? Why is all of this necessary? Good question. Let me explain:
Your Answer to Spending is Answered in the National Security Strategy
Since Eisenhower, the US has pegged spending against the National Security Strategy of each successive presidential administration. During the Cold War, the general US strategy was: "win two major wars at any time" - largely believed to mean the USSR in Europe and China in Asia.
An archive of NSS's since Reagan is available here.
When the Cold War ended, President Clinton changed the strategy to "win hold win" - win one war, hold the line in another, then win that war when the first one concludes. The NSS also was no longer focused specifically on Russia and China. Correspondingly, the US military shrank from 3 million active + reserve to 2.1 million active + reserve. The US carrier fleet went from no fewer than 15 at any time during the Cold War to a necking down to 11 by the mid 2000's. The US anti-submarine patrol force, for instance, was cut in half overnight in the mid 90s.
In the 2000's, Bush changed it to "1-4-2-1" - protect the homeland first, deter aggression in four regions of the world simultaneously, be able to sustain combat operations in two of them, and win one of those decisively.
When Obama took office, he made a major change. First was the 'Pivot to the Pacific' - largely meant to counter China. As a result, the US refocused its efforts on buying conventional high-tech weaponry to face a resurgent and growing Chinese foe, after two decades of neglect or diverted attention under Clinton and Bush (weapons made to fight guys in pickup trucks don't do so well against actual conventional foes).
And in 2015, the NSS was amended again: this time with a refocusing on Russia after their actions in Crime and the Ukraine. Again, instead of arresting defense spending, the President actually asked for more money that year ($630 billlion) than the GOP Congress gave ($610 billion) or what the DOD requested ($580 billion).
(On that note, if you weren't sure, Ishould tell you that budgeting is made by the DOD, amended by the President, and then sent to Congress for voting in).
Lord knows what President Trump wants to do with our National Security Strategy.
As I wrote, since WW2, there has been a conscious decision to shape our military size and capabilities. We concluded after WW2 that we could not sit back and wait to build up modern equipment after aggression has happened, that we need to keep the frontlines overseas, and that we are the only Western nation demographically and economically capable of facing China and Russia.
And that's ultimately what it all comes down to: our spending can be either too much or too little based on what we as a country want to do with our strategy.
SOURCE
Full disclosure: as an officer in the military, I see a lot more of the organizational and budgetary side of things than most, so I wanted to share my two cents on military spending and let you decide on whether we actually spend too much.
As OP mentioned, there's a lot of metrics people use on US budgeting. Let me explore some of these issues in detail and hopefully bust a few myths, give you a historical background, and tell you what we currently peg spending on.
Military Spending - And Its Myths
Yes, the US spends $600 billion dollars on defense. And yes, that's more than the next 7-8 countries combined (assuming China's budget is honest, which we believe is not). And yes, the US spends about 36% of the worlds total spending on military.
But, as OP also mentioned, as a function of GDP, the US is at 3.3% - lower than some nations (like Russia) and a far cry from the 5.6% the US spent in 1988 near the tail end of the Cold War. Source: World Bank.
In the post WW2 world, this is at an all time low per the CFR with it having peaked at 16% around the time of the Korean War.
So which metric is better to use?
Well the issue with looking at nominal spending is that nominal spending doesn't correct for cost of living.
Take into consideration what the military actually spends its money on. You can use Table 5.1 of the GPO or this nifty Official DOD Budget Request 2017 (yes, all this stuff is public) to see the pretty breakdowns.
Per the GPO, for 2013:
- Personnel Wages - 25%
- Operations and Maintenance - 43%
- Procurement - 16%
- R&D - 10%
- Atomic Energy Defense Activities - 3%
- Other - 3%
Why did I bring up cost of living? Let's take a look at personnel wages and benefits shall we. Per the DOD budget request, this chart shows that:
- $130 billion was requested just for military personnel wages for the 2.1 million active + reserve
- A total of $177.9 billion was requested on just military personnel wages + benefits
- Another $72.9 billion was requested for civilian pay and benefits for the 760,000 civilian FTEs in the DOD
- A full $250.8 billion or 48% of the DOD base budget is allocated to JUST pay and benefits
This is further exacerbated by the fact that both China and Russia have huge domestic arms industries producing goods at domestic prices. Furthermore, the world arms industry isn't an open market - the US doesn't compete with China or Russia directly as nations only buy from other nations they trust. The US buys domestic or buys from close allies like Belgium and Germany, who have comparable costs of production. End result? The US often pays 2-4x as much for a fighter jet than the Russian equivalent because US wages, US suppliers, and US maintainers all cost US prices, not Russian prices.
As a side note, this also irks me about the whole "arms trade" statistic and how the US is the number one exporter. Sure, by dollar amounts, we are - but our goods are magnitudes more expensive. The fact that Russia and China - producing goods at Russian and Chinese prices - are even close, should tell you who is exporting more physical quantity of goods, but I digress.
In sum, using nominal spending gives you eye popping numbers, but it tells you little about relative strength between nations. If anything, it should tell you how little Europe actually spends on defense (especially in comparison to Russian strength), and that China is a lot closer to the US than most people realize.
Waste Exists - But It's a Complicated Issue
One of the top issues everyone talks about is waste. Let me first bust one budgetary myth though: use it or lose it is not a DOD only thing. It exists in all federal agencies (e.g. NASA, NOAA, etc.) because the budget is done annually. Money not used one year isn't seen again.
It DOES NOT mean you need to spend it to get it again next year - the budget request is done annually and things change based on need and what not. Admittedly though, it does make it harder to justify getting budgeting if you don't show need, so alas, the system is very flawed. Short of a congressional change to how budgeting is done though, we're in a tough spot.
Does waste in the military exist? Absolutely. Thankfully, people are noticing and paying attention - there has been a considerable shift in mindset in the past few years towards saving money. Of course this has to be balanced: you don't want to skimp on maintenance or training, as lives are on the line when things go wrong.
In some areas, waste is also balanced by operational necessity. For instance, aircraft routinely dump fuel. In carrier aviation, we dump fuel because we have max landing limits - too heavy, and we can snap the arresting gear on the carrier or permanently damage our plane. Thus, if we arrive at the boat too heavy, the choice might be to dump thousands of pounds of fuel... or jettison even more expensive bombs. To the layman, it seems like we're burning fuel for no reason - but there's a rhyme and reason for it no matter how much it sucks. (And for the environmentalists, jet fuel is kerosene based - it's nothing like gasoline)
Inefficient Spending Often Comes from Political Sources
One of the big issues with the annual budgeting is that there is little long term continuity in a field that necessitates long term planning. For instance, the new class of aircraft carrier has been in the works for over a decade - and was planned out two decades ago. And yet, funding for it has oscillated year by year.
I'll give you an example of how political grandstanding has royally fucked military personnel and arguably cost us more money in the long run: sequestration.
During sequestration, a stop was put on training new replacement pilots for the fleet. Hundreds of replacement pilots were put on hold for a year. Well, since they just got their wings in training (costing roughly $1-2 million to train, each), you don't want to cut them from the military, but you still need to pay them.
But here's where the long term effects come in: every pilot in the Navy serves a 3 year operational tour before going back to become an instructor of some sort for 3 years. Whenever a pilot in the fleet is done with his first 3 years, a new replacement pilot comes in to take his place. Suddenly, the fleet had a shortage of pilots, and too many instructor pilots with no one to teach. And once pilots are done with their commitments, a lot get out to pursue other interests in the civilian world. Talk about a waste of human resources.
But this balloons further: a few years later, that shortage of pilots means fewer pilots available to be instructors. Fewer instructors mean fewer replacement pilots. Surely you can balance out how many pilots you bring in right? But ROTC and the Academy projects how many graduates they need from 4 years ago: suddenly, you have too many pilots-to-be and not enough instructors, and the fleet may need more pilots.
I could go into more detail, but the point is this: seemingly small disruptions have BIG ballooning effects on how the military operates.
Likewise, a lot of 'inefficiency' comes from conscious decisions to save money, believe it or not. Take for instance, the fact that much of US equipment is old. In the 90s, with the Cold War drawdown, we stopped a lot of acquisitions programs. Equipment in the military is designed to typically operate in 30 year lifecycles - the notable exceptions are things like capital ships (aircraft carriers).
However, in the 90s, a lot of early to mid Cold War stuff was up for retirement - and instead of replacing them, their lives were extended.
This does, however, have an unintended effect on Operations and Maintenance - the US now has very old equipment to maintain. Some of our equipment is from the 1950s. I'm not even exaggerating - we have over 370 KC-135's, last built in 1965(!). For a long time - particularly with the Cold War drawdown - we put off replacing old equipment, but suddenly with a resurgent China and Russia, we've stretched a lot of these airframes lives out while in the late 2000's we finally sought replacements in the form of the KC-46.
All across the board you can see this happen. The F-22 was to replace the F-15 in the 90s/2000s, but was cut short and now the F-15 has had increasing costs rise to keep an airframe from the 70s and 80s flying. The A-10 was last built in 1984 - it was due for retirement years ago, but Congressmen (like McCain) have kept it alive long past their expiration date.
I hope this all gives a little insight into how a lot of spending issues do exist in the military, but the situation is far more complicated than a simple comparison of nominal spending with other nations, and how waste and inefficiency are complex issues within themselves - sometimes by design, sometimes by outside meddling.
Now, let me explain the historical precedence of US military spending and why our spending is a conscious decision, not one haphazardly done.
The Modern History of Defense Spending
Believe it or not, in the wake of World War II, the US had a major debate over isolationism. There was a major drawdown in the military, with a lot of equipment mothballed or scrapped.
Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe and in Berlin (such as the Berline blockade) and China falling to the communists were all major areas of concern. The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was the Korean War: outright naked aggression by a communist state against another state in the post-WW2 world was just too much. The US used the newly created UN (which the USSR at the time was boycotting) to form a coalition of nations to fight North Korea. In the post-WW2 world, the UN was being tested: would it be toothless like the League of Nations, or would nations actually stand up and prevent wars of conquest?
This led to a major revitalization of the US military which as you can see saw its post-WW2 spike in spending go up to 16% of GDP in the 1950s.
The necessity of a powerful military in the post-WW2 order was predicted by many. Notably, General Marshall, in his Biennial Reports as Chief of Staff of the Army, concluded before WW2 even ended that:
- Oceans were no longer enough to protect the US heartland
- Future defenses necessitated a strong forward deployed presence in the world
- Technological superiority would have to exist as post-conflict mobilization and innovation cost a lot of lives
Even Ike, in his famed 'military industrial complex' speech - which gets taken out of context - actually prefaced that line with his passage:
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.Does all of that sound familiar? Because it should: the US military establishment has been purposefully designed to meet the challenges that General Marshall, Eisenhower, and other top military and political leaders have realized.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
We are interested in global and full-spectrum warfare. A vital part of our defense strategy, in the world of long range missiles, supersonic jets, and precision weapons, is to put our front line of defense across those oceans. Bases in Japan, Korea, and Europe, aren't just there because our allies have hostile forces close by, but also because the further away from the US the conflict is, the more layers of defense any foe has to get through to affect the US directly.
Full spectrum isn't just a catch phrase either: the US is interested in every aspect of warfare from human intelligence to special warfare to ground warfare to air superiority to space superiority.
Whereas in the Cold War, NATO allies often focused on specializing in specific areas due to their small size and lack of funding (e.g. the UK was particularly focused on anti-submarine warfare), the US was designed to be not only the bulk of conventional forces but also charged with handling all areas that other nations lacked: logistics (e.g. the US currently has over 230 strategic airlift transports and over 430 aerial refueling tankers - the rest of NATO has about 10 strategic airlift transports and 40 tankers), submarines, bombers, etc.
Even our current aircraft carrier fleet is set to 11 ships by design. Why 11?
- Each aircraft carrier is nuclear powered. With a 50-year lifespan, each carrier goes into drydock at the 25 year mark for its reactor's refueling
- The refueling process is complex and lengthy, and takes 2-3 years to complete at which time the ship goes through major repairs and overhauls to stay relevant the next 25 years
- At the end of said overhaul, another 1-2 years are put on the ship for testing and what not
- With each carrier produced at a staggered 4-5 year interval, at any given time, one of our 11 carriers is out of service
- One carrier is permanently forward deployed to Japan
- Carriers are operated in 18 month cycles broken into 6 month periods. There is a six month deployment followed by six months mostly at home giving crew rest and doing minor repairs and maintenance, and six months in training for the next deployment.
- Nine stateside carriers = 3 rotations of 3 ships rotating inside those 18 month cycles
- Not coincidentally, we have a Pacific Ocean to care about, an Atlantic Ocean to care about, and an Indian Ocean that Congress mandates we care about. The President can truly ask "where are my carriers" any day of the year at any time.
But why you ask? Why is all of this necessary? Good question. Let me explain:
Your Answer to Spending is Answered in the National Security Strategy
Since Eisenhower, the US has pegged spending against the National Security Strategy of each successive presidential administration. During the Cold War, the general US strategy was: "win two major wars at any time" - largely believed to mean the USSR in Europe and China in Asia.
An archive of NSS's since Reagan is available here.
When the Cold War ended, President Clinton changed the strategy to "win hold win" - win one war, hold the line in another, then win that war when the first one concludes. The NSS also was no longer focused specifically on Russia and China. Correspondingly, the US military shrank from 3 million active + reserve to 2.1 million active + reserve. The US carrier fleet went from no fewer than 15 at any time during the Cold War to a necking down to 11 by the mid 2000's. The US anti-submarine patrol force, for instance, was cut in half overnight in the mid 90s.
In the 2000's, Bush changed it to "1-4-2-1" - protect the homeland first, deter aggression in four regions of the world simultaneously, be able to sustain combat operations in two of them, and win one of those decisively.
When Obama took office, he made a major change. First was the 'Pivot to the Pacific' - largely meant to counter China. As a result, the US refocused its efforts on buying conventional high-tech weaponry to face a resurgent and growing Chinese foe, after two decades of neglect or diverted attention under Clinton and Bush (weapons made to fight guys in pickup trucks don't do so well against actual conventional foes).
And in 2015, the NSS was amended again: this time with a refocusing on Russia after their actions in Crime and the Ukraine. Again, instead of arresting defense spending, the President actually asked for more money that year ($630 billlion) than the GOP Congress gave ($610 billion) or what the DOD requested ($580 billion).
(On that note, if you weren't sure, Ishould tell you that budgeting is made by the DOD, amended by the President, and then sent to Congress for voting in).
Lord knows what President Trump wants to do with our National Security Strategy.
As I wrote, since WW2, there has been a conscious decision to shape our military size and capabilities. We concluded after WW2 that we could not sit back and wait to build up modern equipment after aggression has happened, that we need to keep the frontlines overseas, and that we are the only Western nation demographically and economically capable of facing China and Russia.
And that's ultimately what it all comes down to: our spending can be either too much or too little based on what we as a country want to do with our strategy.
SOURCE
Friday, February 24, 2017
If Lemony Snicket Described Donald Trump
It is a strange fact of this world that the buildings people live in often reflect what they are like. For example, I once knew a woman who lived in a very impractical home shaped like a shoe, and who suffered from perpetual verrucas, due to damp from an ineffective drainage system shaped to look like shoelaces. It is therefore not surprising that we sometimes use metaphors about buildings to say what somebody is like. So a person who is very learned and is a professor of math might be said to live in an ivory tower. Rather than being a tall building made of elephant's tusk, this means that the person in question inhabits a rarefied atmosphere, words which here indicate that they are so clever they have become removed from reality.
President Trump did indeed have a tower named after him, and he was quite removed from reality, but no one could say whether he was clever. Although Trump Tower was not a metaphor, it could be turned into one. For instance, somebody might say that the giant, glass construction was an evidence of his vainglory, a word which here means 'ruthless self-obsession and desire to take over the world'.
If it is unfair to judge people on the basis of the houses they live in, it is even more insensitive to criticize them for how they look. Polite, respectable children such as Violet, Klaus and Sunny would never have said that Count Olaf was evil because he looked evil. Yet he did look villainous, because he enjoyed playing the part of the villain. This being so, however, he went to great lengths to appear not to be a villain in order to fool people over the course of his evil schemes.
President Trump, the case in point, was a very bad man, but he cultivated the air of a permanently affronted toad. What we would like from this world in which people act in the ways we expect from their clothes and their houses is for villains to disguise themselves ostentatiously, a word which here means 'in ridiculous wigs and with make-up that fools no-one except those with responsibility for the Baudelaire orphans'. We should like our villains to go about their evil plans in underhand manners helped by a troupe of immoral actors. We should like them to reveal the plan gleefully to its victims, and for it to just barely fail at the last minute, so that they can once again escape the clutches of justice and leave the Baudelaire orphans with a glimmer of hope, even if that glimmer of hope is like the memory of an ember fading in the fireplace of a beloved mansion that was all-too tragically burned to the ground.
What we want from our villains is that moment when the scales may fall from the eyes of those who were up-to-now taken in.
President Trump did not need to disguise himself to engage in his peculiar brand of villainy. The suit into which he fitted like a plasticine model of himself was one he was probably born into. Everything that seemed ridiculous about him was in fact essentially him, no matter how improbable it seemed. For this reason, there was no moment at which the fake moustache could fall off, so to speak, and for the evil scheme to suddenly become apparent to all. He had made himself successful by a curious show of telling everyone how evil he was, so that he was like a magician who tells you what the trick they will perform is, then fools you anyway. Now nobody could grab at the side of his face and tug to show that it was really a convincing rubber mask. It no longer had any effect to point out, rationally, why his whole rationale was evil. To use one of the real metaphors of which we have just spoken, what seemed to be his wig was, in fact, unconvincing hair.
President Trump did indeed have a tower named after him, and he was quite removed from reality, but no one could say whether he was clever. Although Trump Tower was not a metaphor, it could be turned into one. For instance, somebody might say that the giant, glass construction was an evidence of his vainglory, a word which here means 'ruthless self-obsession and desire to take over the world'.
If it is unfair to judge people on the basis of the houses they live in, it is even more insensitive to criticize them for how they look. Polite, respectable children such as Violet, Klaus and Sunny would never have said that Count Olaf was evil because he looked evil. Yet he did look villainous, because he enjoyed playing the part of the villain. This being so, however, he went to great lengths to appear not to be a villain in order to fool people over the course of his evil schemes.
President Trump, the case in point, was a very bad man, but he cultivated the air of a permanently affronted toad. What we would like from this world in which people act in the ways we expect from their clothes and their houses is for villains to disguise themselves ostentatiously, a word which here means 'in ridiculous wigs and with make-up that fools no-one except those with responsibility for the Baudelaire orphans'. We should like our villains to go about their evil plans in underhand manners helped by a troupe of immoral actors. We should like them to reveal the plan gleefully to its victims, and for it to just barely fail at the last minute, so that they can once again escape the clutches of justice and leave the Baudelaire orphans with a glimmer of hope, even if that glimmer of hope is like the memory of an ember fading in the fireplace of a beloved mansion that was all-too tragically burned to the ground.
What we want from our villains is that moment when the scales may fall from the eyes of those who were up-to-now taken in.
President Trump did not need to disguise himself to engage in his peculiar brand of villainy. The suit into which he fitted like a plasticine model of himself was one he was probably born into. Everything that seemed ridiculous about him was in fact essentially him, no matter how improbable it seemed. For this reason, there was no moment at which the fake moustache could fall off, so to speak, and for the evil scheme to suddenly become apparent to all. He had made himself successful by a curious show of telling everyone how evil he was, so that he was like a magician who tells you what the trick they will perform is, then fools you anyway. Now nobody could grab at the side of his face and tug to show that it was really a convincing rubber mask. It no longer had any effect to point out, rationally, why his whole rationale was evil. To use one of the real metaphors of which we have just spoken, what seemed to be his wig was, in fact, unconvincing hair.
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