Hey - blogging's been slow cuz works been pretty intense of late.   I have put up some smaller pieces on a group blog I belong to - Sepia Mutiny.  In the meantime, here's an interesting interview with Colin Powell by one of the biggest stud Libertarian reporters of all time - PJ O'Rourke.

 I talked to the Secretary of State in his office on June 21, 2004. In the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs he'd written, "The sources of national strength and security for one nation need no longer threaten the security of others. Politics need not always be a zero-sum competition."

 POWELL: Yeah, most of my career was in a zero-sum world—us versus the Russians. Zero-sum kind of takes you to places like Vietnam. The domino theory is a form of zero-sum thinking.

... P. J. O'ROURKE: There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.

... SECRETARY POWELL: You've heard the wonderful story about the elephants? This was at a game reserve in Botswana or somewhere. They had found a dead rhinoceros, and they couldn't figure out who had killed it. The rhinoceros doesn't have any natural enemies. They looked and looked and found that there were these elephants, male elephants, that were killing rhinoceros. They were young elephants that had been brought from another reserve far away, but they had been brought just as two adolescent male elephants, and—

P. J. O'ROURKE: An elephant gang.

SECRETARY POWELL: An elephant gang. And so the game keepers didn't know what to do. They didn't want to kill them. And it occurred to some guy, very early one morning he said, "I've got it." They just went and got some older male elephants. They brought two male elephants, adult male elephants in with these teenagers, and within a few months, problem solved. The teenagers didn't know how to act. The male elephants made it clear to them: "Excuse me, boy. This is not what elephants do. We don't go around chomping on rhinoceri."

Fascinating.