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Laura Rosen called it Erasing History, but by any name it is stupid.

Clinton worked to make government cheaper and more efficient. One of the things he did was order all classified document over 25 years old declassified unless there was a specific reason to keep it secret.

I worked with classified documents and every document has a paper trail. They are like library books, requiring you to check them out and check them back in. They have to be kept in safes inside secure rooms. The rooms are inside specially designed and protected buildings. I worked inside vaults and had to remember changing passwords. I had to challenge anyone I didn’t recognize in the secure area. There were guns and gas involved in the protection schemes. There were plans to destroy everything that involved Thermite grenades and a good chance of injury or death in the process. That is expensive.

So we started cleaning out the closets, and then the paranoids crawled out from under their rocks, and claimed that secrets had been exposed.

When Bush came in, the paranoids had their leader and they are trying to re-classify everything. It’s stupid. It’s expensive. It’s part of their cult.

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One of the major problems with American foreign policy is that the United States uses a different time scale than much of the rest of the world. Americans want things done now, they live very much in the now, forgetting about the past and ignoring the future.

Americans can’t credit that Iran is building nuclear reactors and the United Arab Emirates are buying up businesses all over the world because they are planning for their grandchildren and the grandchildren of their grandchildren. They know that the oil won’t last forever and they are moving beyond it.

The Chinese don’t deal in time spans of less than five years to do anything, and treat five years like Americans treat days. The Chinese government is not the individual at the top, but the entire bureaucracy that existed before the Party and will continue after the Party disappears.

Americans can’t relate to people still angry about things that happened centuries ago, because we have lost the ancestor worship that is part of the lives of people in other countries. As a nation of immigrants, by coming to the “New World” we broke free of our roots and ancestors. History is not valued by Americans. Many Americans made a conscious decision to break their ties to the past when they came to this country.

Many American corporations think from quarter to quarter. Management doesn’t worry about the long term results of their actions, because they don’t expect to be with the company very long, so any consequences will be someone else’s problem. That’s why senior management always has their severance package nailed down before they accept a job with a new firm.

Think about it: we don’t want to do anything about global warming because we would have to make sacrifices to safeguard future generations.

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Showing why he is Sultan of Snark, TBogg:

…In fact, the only person I can think of that is dumb enough to support it is John Tierney who is so divorced from reality he doesn’t even get visitation rights.

Via Oliver Willis, for your consideration: Kwale Killer Kartoon.

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