PJ O’Rourke – “Bipartisan Consensus,” in World Affairs Winter 2008
Foreign policy has been divided, conceptually, between the “realists” and the “idealists.” The idealists who have no idea what reality is. And the realists who just plain have no idea.

There are the foreign policy experts who refuse to play the game because the quarterback on the other team wasn’t democratically selected. And there are the foreign policy experts who are eager to run with the ball but don’t know which end zone they’re supposed to be headed toward.

Ideas aren’t real. You can’t eat an idea. But you can’t deliver a beefsteak with no idea of what a cow is.

Idealists produce bad foreign policy. On the other hand, realists produce bad foreign policy. But the worst foreign policy is produced by realists and idealists working together. This is called bipartisan consensus. Those are the two most frightening words in Washington. Bipartisan consensus is like when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.

World Affairs won’t be a “realist” publication, because we intend to find the facts rather than pretend that we know them already. And World Affairs won’t be an “idealist” publication, because we intend that our arguments will lead to your conclusions, not that our conclusions will lead to a bunch of arguments with you.


Alan Weisman – The World Without Us – Harper Perennial, Toronto, 2007 – pg 87 – “certain persistent species of plants and animals typically survived periods of climatic and geologic upheaval. One of these was us....whenever climate and environmental conditions grew unruly, early species of Homo outnumbered, and finally displaced, even earlier hominids. Adaptability is the key to who is fittest, one species’ extinction being another’s evolution HUMAN EVOLUTION - ADAPTABILITY
Mayans – pg 291 – Did mounting populations exhausting the land, tempting Petexbatun rulers to seize their neighbors’ property, leading to a cycle of response that spiralled into cataclysmic war? If anything...it was the other way around: An unleashed lust for wealth and power turned them into aggressors, resulting in reprisals that required their cities to abandon vulnerable outlying fields and intensify production closer to home, eventually pushing land beyond its tolerance. “society had evolved too many elites, all demanding exotic baubles.” He describes a culture wobbling under the weight of an excess of nobles, all needing quetzal feathers, jade, obsidian, fine chert, custom polychrome, fancy corbelled roofs, and animal furs. Nobility is expensive, non-productive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings. MAYAN STATUS SEEKING AND DOWNFALL