America 2150

Nonne E. Souris is entertaining itself imagining the new borders of the continental United States after 140 more years of climate change.

Pretty sure of this: most of Florida will be gone.  What hasn’t disappeared under the rising ocean will be uninhabitable due to hostile weather patterns and contaminated aquifers.

Also highly likely: the offshore islands and intracoastal waterway of the Atlantic coastline will be functionally extinct.  The sounds and bays of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New York, and Massachusetts will be, basically, damaged beyond use.  All that multi-million dollar oceanfront real estate will be gone.

How about the Gulf Coast?  If we had any brains, we’d dynamite those levees now.  But since we don’t, it will take two generations for the rest of the swamp people to give up and move inland.  New Orleans will be gone.  The new port of Louisiana will probably be at Baton Rouge, and in Texas it’ll be Houston.

Moving west, as the Gulf of California (a.k.a. Sea of Cortez) fills up, it’s going to push north into the dried-up estuary of the Colorado River.  If western weather patterns cooperate, that river will be meeting the sea again; if not, it’ll be one big salt flat.

Some low-lying cities of Southern California – probably including the Los Angeles basin, and almost certainly the Coronado peninsula of San Diego - will be lost to storm surge.

More chunks of the western coast will crumble off; Highway 1 will eventually get simply too expensive to maintain, and will become a discontinuous local road.  Parts of the San Francisco Bay area will have to pull up their skirts and hike off to the south, east, or north.

If I had to make a bet on the coastal states least likely to lose significant territory over the next 140 years, I’d bet on Washington, Oregon, and Maine.  Maine has a crazy coastline now that will probably get smoothed out a bit, but it’s protected from a lot by Nova Scotia and by the extent of the continental shelf.

It’s going to take another couple of decades to see if new weather patterns establish themselves.  If the drought pattern persists, I think we’re going to see a huge population shift out of eastern California, Arizona and Nevada, and into Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and New Mexico.

I don’t know if we’ll see a shift off the Atlantic coast into the interior.  There’s lots of empty space in Nebraska and Kansas, but the interior states are not all that culturally friendly to incursions by the more diverse populations we have on our coasts.

I won’t live to see it, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

the good old days

I’m starting to think the single most destructive force in human nature is not violence, not greed, not lust, not envy … but nostalgia.

Maybe because I’ve read a lot of history.  Maybe because I see how people who are overly attached to some version of the past are largely ineffective in the present.

Or maybe because even the most cursory look at current events reveals tragedy after outrage after mindfuck perpetrated by people who want things to go back to The Way They Were.

See what I’m getting at?

The good old days.  That’s what political or social conservatism is really all about.  It’s about fear of change. It’s about wanting to go back to some imagined past culture in which men were manly, noble, and chivalrous; women were womanly, modest, and controllable; children were respectful, clean, quiet, and helpful; government only did what you personally wanted it to do; and … but why go on?

This rosy vision of the past never existed.  It never existed anywhere, at any time.

Every generation looks forward with dismay to the coming apocalypse, inevitably to be shepherded into being by the worthless, shiftless, illiterate, overindulged next generation.  And every generation looks back at the culture of its remembered childhood as being … what?  Some paradise of social justice and world peace?  It NEVER EXISTED.

I know people, intelligent and educated people, who talk and behave as if they think there was never, for example, a child molester until 1970 and never a mass murder until Columbine.  In the mental construct of this kind of crippling nostalgia, everyone used to live in peaceful small towns where neighbors looked out for each other, racism didn’t exist, no man beat his wife.  This has never been true.  Maybe it’s comforting to think that it was.  But it has simply never been true.

And it does no-one any good to pretend that everything used to be better.  It is completely anti-productive to claim that the country (or the world) is going to hell in a handbasket because we don’t follow traditional values.

What the hell are traditional values, anyway?  Are those the traditional values that say black people can’t be citizens, and woman can’t own property, and daughters can be traded to secure a real estate transaction?  Are those the traditional values that say a man can’t be tried for rape, but a woman who has been raped can be thrown in jail, or forced to marry her rapist, or stoned to death?  Who gets to define them?

NOSTALGIA IS BULLSHIT.

The world we have today may not be the world we want, but it’s got a much better future than traditional-values conservatives want to think.  Anytime elected officials start yapping about traditional values, it’s because they don’t have any new ideas.  If you look around the world, you can pretty plainly see that the countries that refuse to govern themselves on a basis of progress are the countries distinguished by the persistence of disabling, preventable diseases; by religious wars; by unchecked political corruption; and by stomach-churning violence against women, against people of the “wrong” race, against people of the “wrong” religion or language.

New ideas are where progress comes from.  Old ideas deserve to stay in the old days.

A news magazine prompted this post by quoting writer Milan Kundera as follows:  “The Greek word for ‘return’ is nostos.  Algos means ‘suffering.’ So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

Buddhism holds that attachment is suffering.  Attachment to the past = nostalgia = suffering.  Get over it.  Live for today and be inspired by tomorrow, because the past is really not someplace you want to be.

“is Earth fucked?”

Well, OF COURSE NOT.

On the other hand, humans almost certainly are.  Fucked, that is.

A new essay looks at the growing willingness of scientists to come right out and say “we may not be able to fix this even if we start right now.”  Or, “we may be able to fix some of this, but it’s going to hurt a lot and cost a lot.”  Read it here: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/12/is_earth_f_ked_at_2012_agu_meeting_scientists_consider_advocacy_activism.html

As a non-scientist, it is nevertheless clear to me that the effects of human civilizations on planet Earth have reached what is probably critical mass.  That is, the damages we have collectively wrought, from the first campfire to the latest oil spill, are probably irremediable.  From this point forward, we may be able to divert the worst of the cumulative damage, but we can’t stop it and we can’t reverse it.  Not without massive, global, united changes in human behavior.  And you know that ain’t gonna happen.

So there will be mass extinctions.  Not just of trivial subspecies like those tiny fish that live in one pothole in Death Valley, but of, for example, all Atlantic Ocean game fish.  You think tuna is expensive now?  You think it’s hard to find fresh Atlantic salmon or cod, or ten other species that used to be cheap and plentiful?  Get used to eating farmed catfish, people … before long that will be your only affordable choice.  And in fact, if you want to be a real survivalist, learn to farm your own.

There will be massive utility failures.  There will be unprecedented droughts and floods, with food insecurity ranging from price spikes to outright famine.  There will be battles, ranging from lawsuits to actual wars, over access to fresh water.  There will be property losses on unimaginable scales.  I mean, if you look at a world map and note the above-sea-level numbers … well, it would be delusional to think Florida is going to be there in 150 years if current trends continue, wouldn’t it?  Or all those little islands in the Pacific that are less than 20 feet above sea level?  One of those island nations is already planning to move - lock, stock, government, and canoe - to higher ground.

But Earth will survive.

All of her species will not.  The giant sequoia’s days are probably numbered, as are those of polar bears, emperor penguins, tigers, and most other creatures requiring cold temperatures or large ranges.  Say goodbye to the whales, the wolves, the moose, the panda, the grizzly … and to the albatross, the pika, the migratory shorebirds, the sea otter.

Humans will probably survive, too.  The next couple of generations are the ones that have a chance of making societal changes that will ease the transition from a consumption-heavy civilization to one that treads more lightly.  Those of us who will die before the end of this century can contribute much to mitigating the effects of pollution.  That’s what “global warming” really comes down to, you know.

Climate change, if indeed it has been potentiated or accelerated by fossil-fuel emissions (which I happen to believe) … well, fossil-fuel emissions are pollution.  The fertilizer runoff that’s changing ocean chemistry at ever-accelerating rates is pollution.  The giant landfills that are quietly stewing away, with toxic chemicals leaching out into the adjacent earth and water: that’s pollution.  The clouds of methane hovering over our factory farms: pollution.  The physical trash itself, a stupendous quantity of waste: pollution.

Our future generations are likely to have a very different life.  It may look a lot more like the world of the Hunger Games than some of us would like to admit.  I predict that a prominent future career will be Landfill Miner.  Distiller will probably also be a valued career, because even the fresh water that can be found will be impure.  Someone who sets up a company that does those things using solar power is going to make a fortune.

The bottom line is, Earth can and will heal herself.  She’s already been through some shit.  She’s been through mass extinctions and cataclysmic climate change (if you believe the 4.5 billion years of geological record, which I do).  She’s come back more beautiful and creative each time, but each time a different species came out on top.

I tend to think it won’t be humans next time.

no mercy

The health horror story of the week is right here:

http://news.yahoo.com/obese-woman-denied-flights-home-dies-abroad-191137549–abc-news-topstories.html;_ylt=AnvAY6sVOAu2ZeShy3YJz1TNbbUC;_ylu=X3oDMTNqZGFiODR2BGNjb2RlA2N0LmMEcGtnAzBiYzYzNTczLTAyNDctMzlmNS04MDE4LWU4M2EzM2FhZjQ1MARwb3MDMQRzZWMDbW9zdF9wb3B1bGFyBHZlcgNmZGFlZWY1MS0zODljLTExZTItYmNkZi0zMjkxZWUxZTBmNGY-;_ylg=X3oDMTI0bWhiYWNxBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDBHBzdGNhdANlbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50fGRlYXJhYmJ5BHB0A3NlY3Rpb25z;_ylv=3

A wheelchair-bound 407-pound woman with kidney failure died while waiting for an airline, any airline, to allow her to board.  Or to find a way for her to board.  Lawyers are licking their chops.  This woman had already lost a leg; the story doesn’t say why, but I would bet the amputation and the kidney failure were due to diabetes, which can likely be traced to weighing 400 pounds.

I am sorry this happened.  I really am.  I feel bad for her husband.  But this woman did not die because airlines wouldn’t board her.

She died because she weighed 407 pounds and had kidney failure.

She probably would have died right around this time regardless of where she was.  If she had made it back to the U.S. she probably would have gone straight from the airport to the hospital, where special gurneys and beds and wheelchairs would have had to be provided for her because she was simply too big to fit on standard medical equipment, and extra staff would have been required to care for her because the usual team wouldn’t have been able to lift her.

I can’t believe, frankly, that KLM got her on the original flight from the U.S. to Hungary.  That’s not a short flight.  How does someone who cannot walk, and who cannot be lifted, manage an eight-hour flight?  If the kidney failure hadn’t gotten her, deep-vein thrombosis probably would.

There has to come a point at which we say “I know that I cannot expect to be accommodated in every situation.”  When you are three times the size of a healthy person, you have reached that point.

Yes, obese people have rights and they deserve to be treated humanely.  But the growing numbers of obese people also need to realize that when you cannot care for yourself there is a certain limit to how much care you are entitled to from others.  Your friends and family may continue to make accommodations and sacrifices for you.  But the world in general can’t afford to have an unlimited range of equipment.

It’s irrational to expect that a commercial airline “should” be able to accommodate grossly obese individuals who cannot move themselves.  Put cruelly, that’s cargo, not a passenger.  It’s a hazard to other passengers and to the crew.  Medical professionals are injured all the time trying to move patients – including patients of normal weight – who cannot support themselves.  It’s simply not reasonable to expect a flight attendant to be a medical caregiver, especially when you have special needs of this magnitude.

And realistically, allowing someone of 3x normal weight to board means two other people can’t get on the flight.  These airplanes are not made to safely accommodate people who won’t fit in the seats, and that’s just the way it is.

on celebrating veterans

I have no problem with Veterans’ Day.  Armistice Day, Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the end of World War I – it’s been around a long time in its various guises, is not just a U.S. holiday, and is much more properly a ”national” holiday, in my opinion, than (e.g.) Christmas.

So my problem has nothing to do with the holiday itself.  It has to do with the shallow, sentimental, and ahistorical nature of most observances of it.

People thank “the veterans” for preserving “our freedom.”  And that’s not what our veterans have done.

Except for oft-forgotten and shamefully genocidal battles against Native Americans, there has not been a battle fought on U.S. soil since the Civil War.  Even the strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941 does not qualify – it was not a battle; it was a highly successful foray, legitimately categorized as a sneak attack.  We have not been invaded.  Our federal government has never been in serious danger of toppling due to military action by an outside force.  Our soldiers, in other words, since the Civil War ended have been fighting for quite different ends than “preserving our freedom.”

The U.S. is under no existential threat.  The most damage any other nation has ever been able to do to us has been when we joined our allies in fighting mutual adversaries on foreign soil.  The two World Wars, as ghastly as they were, really did not come close to threatening the existence of the U.S.  We lost a lot of (mostly) men, certainly, but not enough to kill the economy or our ability to function as a nation.  World War II in particular was a death-dealer, but as a percentage of population did we lose more men then than in the Civil War?  I doubt it.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war

All of this is not meant to minimize the important work done by our military members past and present.  Quite the contrary.

We’ve fought some colonial battles.  We tried to take certain territories by force, or to install by force a government of our choosing; in some cases we were successful.  We’re still doing some of that, and I personally wish we would stop.  The colonial age wasn’t glorious, and it wasn’t much of a success in the long term – certainly not an unqualified success.  But that isn’t, in the main, what our military veterans are doing or have done.

What our veterans have done, and what makes them particularly worthy of being celebrated, is to defend our allies.  To defend their freedom.  To defend their territory.

The men and women of our military do far more than fight in self-defense.  They fight, in loyalty to their commanders and our nation, FOR OTHER PEOPLE.

Thank our veterans, by all means.  But thank them for what they really do: form the front line against dictators, terrorists, religious fanatics, oligarchs, and others who think it’s okay to use force to subjugate, to oppress, or to conquer.

They’re not just fighting for the U.S.  They’re fighting for a free world.

And the vast majority of them do it regardless of their politics or personal opinions.  They follow their orders.  Sometimes the orders are ill-advised or, frankly, stupid.  But that doesn’t mean, and shouldn’t mean, that we think less of the military professionals who carry out the orders.  That means that we turn around and smack the shit out of the politicians who came up with that particular strategy.

In fact, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Veterans’ Day than by smacking the shit out of politicians who continue to pour lives down the drain in the service of some ideological nonsense.  And then let’s bring ‘em home, patch ‘em up, and find ‘em a decent job.

That would mean a lot more than just putting out a big flag and saying “we love our veterans.”

 

your kid does not belong at “Skyfall”

Or at Morton’s.  Or at any other restaurant where the average entree price is higher than $15, or at any other movie rated PG-13 or up.  Certainly not at the symphony, or opera, or theatre, or ballet … unless they have a children’s matinee.

I’m all for acculturating your child.  My parents managed it through a wonderful thing called PBS.  With modern satellite entertainment options, there’s no reason you can’t expose your child to great art and culture AT HOME … while you are training it how to behave in public.  (I use “it” because it is too tiresome to contemplate saying “him or her” repeatedly during this post.)

Seriously, folks.  What is the net benefit of having your toddler sit through an R-rated movie?  (Or, more likely, NOT sit through it.)  You will be taking the kid out for a bathroom break halfway through, because you let it have the large soda, and before and after that event it will be kicking the seat in front of it and/or twisting around to stage-whisper to you or its siblings that you also brought along, or dropping its box of Jujubes or popcorn, or spilling the drink.  You’re going to miss a lot of the movie because you are managing your kid.  OR you are going to deservedly earn the hatred of every moviegoer around you because you aren’t managing your kid.

Prices being what they are, is it really less expensive to take the kids along to an inappropriate movie or restaurant than to leave them at home with a babysitter?  Are your community or neighborhood ties really so insubstantial that you don’t have anyone you can call to stay with your kids while you have an adult night out?

Or: is taking your kids out into the world really the only way you can educate them about how to behave in it?  Because if you think so, I think you’re wrong.  Good behavior is good behavior whether you are at home or out in public.

Or maybe you just think, now that you have kids, that your life revolves around them and everything you do has to include them.

Honestly … it kind of doesn’t.  Or shouldn’t.  Your kid may be the center of your life for 18-20 years, but that’s a fairly small proportion of your life.  If, like many parents these days seem to, you cease all adult activity for that 18-20 years, where do you think YOUR friends go during that time?

Some of them do just what you’re doing, of course.  They are bunkering down with the Mini Me’s and forgetting how to speak in complete sentences.  But others go out and do adult things, if they have any brains.  They keep some friends who can talk about more than kid stuff.  They probably travel, go to the symphony or the opera, maybe take up a sport.

A parent whose life revolves around his/her child becomes a boring person.  To other adults, and probably to the child.  This is a side effect worth considering when you are debating whether to bring little Tiffany along to see “Bridesmaids.”  You should be able to continue appreciating life, and culture, on an adult level … even if you have a child.

Radical, I know.

so, you want to balance the budget?

Meaning, eliminate the deficit and start paying back the national debt?

Sounds great, doesn’t it. Here’s what that really requires. (And here’s why nobody is going to do it anytime soon.)

The cold hard horrifying truth is that the U.S. federal budget needs to be cut by about 30%, while revenues hold steady, in order to reduce future obligations (including paying down the national debt). Only when (or if) revenues actually track fairly closely with government obligations should any tax decreases be considered. Even then, in my opinion, most individual Americans don’t pay enough in taxes – compared to the value of the services they receive – and most large corporations certainly don’t. In my world, tax loopholes are closed, capital gains of more than $10K are taxed as income, and the top marginal rates are raised until the debt is under control.

According to the US Debt Clock, Federal income tax (individual and corporate) revenues alone are, currently, roughly one trillion dollars per year. The Federal debt is just under 15 trillion dollars. My math tells me that with costs a bit less than revenues, we could pay off the national debt in fifteen years – well, call it sixteen for interest – if that’s all that we did with that income tax revenue.

Of course, that’s not all we have to do with that money. Total federal revenue (including payroll tax) is roughly 2.2 trillion. Total federal spending (including entitlements) is currently 3.6 trillion. If we cut spending by 30%, we get an essentially balanced budget. However, we don’t account for accelerated payments on that massive debt – and reducing the debt is desirable, if only for the fact that it would then cease to be a centerpiece of political discord.

A lower national debt would also, of course, give our country greater leverage and credibility in world affairs. But to my way of thinking, its principal benefit would be that it is off the table as a topic for political parties to bitch at each other about.

If there were no Congressional obstructionists, no lobbyists, and no histrionic party apparatchiks to get in the way of a dedicated government effort to balance the budget, it could be done. It would hurt everybody to some extent, but wouldn’t necessarily destroy anybody.

A table of proposed cuts and redistributions, with new names for some departments and bureaus that I think are inefficiently constructed in our current arrangement, might look something like this.

Department or Program: Original Budget - New Budget

Agriculture: 23.9 billion - 2.5 billion (I told you this was going to hurt)
Civilian Service Advisory Bureau: 1.3 billion – .05 billion
Commerce: 8.8 billion – 17.5 billion (they get more because, in my world, they’d be doing more)
Corps of Engineers: 4.6 billion – 2.5 billion
Defense: 707.5 billion – 557.5 billion
Education: 77.4 billion – 52.5 billion
Energy: 29.5 billion – 0 (ouch, but we can’t keep everything)
Health & Human Services: 80 billion – 37 billion
Homeland Security: 43.2 billion – 0 (functions to be wrapped into other departments)
Housing and Urban Development: 48 billion – 0 (I know, I’m sorry, but this is nonessential)
Justice: 28.2 billion – 28 billion (I don’t happen to think this is a department we can afford to skimp on)
Labor: 12.8 billion – 8 billion
Medicare: 748 billion – 500 billion
NERD: (NASA, NSF, etc.): 18.7 billion – 32 billion (and this is an area we need to invest more in)
National Nuclear Security Admin: 0 – 12 billion (read Rachel Maddow’s book “Drift” for more on why this is necessary)
Native American Affairs: 7.1 billion – 5 billion
Natural Resources: 0 – 20 billion
Small Business Admin: 1 billion – 0
Social Security: 816.5 billion – 512.5 billion
State: 47 billion – 71 billion
Transportation: 13.4 billion – 0
Treasury: 14 billion – 0 (functions go to other departments)
Veterans: 129 billion – 100 billion
TOTALS: Original budget request: 2 trillion, 859.9 billion; New budget: 1 trillion, 958.05 billion

The new budget is well under our 2.2 trillion in actual revenue.  That means we have money left over to pay down the debt.  See?  It can be done.

It can ONLY be done by including Defense, Medicare, and Social Security in cuts.  There really isn’t so much “fraud” or “waste” in the system that simply closing loopholes will get the job done, and stepping up enforcement costs money.  Benefits themselves have to be cut.  I don’t like this (I’m not receiving them myself yet, though I hope to one day) but I would rather that everybody gets something than that a bunch of people in the future suddenly find themselves with nothing.

Look … change hurts.  I get it.  Nobody wants to give anything up.  But that’s the thinking that got us into this.

 

it’s coming, whether you believe in it or not

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2096055,00.html?xid=rss-fullhealthsci-yahoo

This article was published about a year ago and is well worth revisiting.  Or, if you missed it the first time, READ IT NOW.  Since then, as you may (or may not) recall, a major climate-change denier has recanted.  He still won’t concede that the activities of humans have contributed/are contributing to climate change, but the data are apparently now clear enough for him to say yeah, okay, it’s getting hotter.*

I like one thing in particular about this well-written essay. I mean, I like the whole article, or I wouldn’t be linking it, but this in particular I like:

“… polarization is harmless in sports — and indeed, it can be essential to the fun. It’s insanity as a basis for complex public policy.”

Oh, so very true. Here’s what I think:

• Climate change is for real. The polar ice caps really are melting. Weather patterns really are changing. Ocean levels and global average temperatures really are rising.
• It doesn’t matter why. Regardless of the causes for these real, observable changes, humans need to pay attention and accept that human behavior is going to have to change as a consequence.
• Burning fossil fuels is damaging the environment. Whether or not petrocarbons are “responsible” for climate change is actually kind of irrelevant. We know – and have known for decades – that burning fossil fuels wrecks air quality and water quality, produces carcinogenic and teratogenic by-product chemicals, and in consequence directly contributes to higher rates of disease, death, and extinction.
• Fossil fuel supplies are going to run out eventually. Completely irrespective of their environmental impact, there is only so much oil, natural gas, coal, etc to be extracted. Eventually we – as a species – are going to have to get along without them. If we don’t, the species who never used them, and that survive the climatological evolution of the planet, will be our successors.
• We got along without fossil fuels quite well for quite a long time. Humans didn’t start burning coal and oil and natural gas on a large scale until less than two hundred years ago. We know a lot more now than we knew then. And the species has not, all “Jersey Shore” evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, gotten less ingenious. We almost certainly have enough of all this stuff to get us through this century … but not necessarily beyond that.  It wouldn’t be a bad idea to start governing ourselves accordingly.  As they say in legal cease-and-desist letters.
• We have the potential, right now, to begin changing our behavior, right now. We don’t have to wait until Florida and the Maldives are under water, and West Virginia and Chengdu are smoking craters of fracked, poisonous sludge. Therefore …
• Arguing about whether climate change is “real” or not is nothing but an idiotic exercise in reality-avoidance.

The Earth is not going to end in the next twenty years, or probably in the next two thousand years. Humans are going to be living on it. It might, just possibly, maybe, be a good idea to start moving away from the coastlines and floodplains NOW. To start taking renewable energy seriously NOW. To stop wasting time, money, and ingenuity on holding back the oceans NOW.

There is plenty of Earth to go around, believe it or not, and fewer people will die fighting over it if we start thinking in terms of “how can we work with what’s coming” instead of “whose fault is this mess.”

*And one thing I’d really like to emphasize is IT DOESN’T MATTER WHY.  It only matters that it is happening.  Govern yourself accordingly.

afghanistan: get out now

There is no point in trying anymore.  Not because there are no good people left (there are) or because the people don’t have a rich history worth trying to save (they do) or because the land itself doesn’t possess resources the world could use (it does).

It’s time to give up on Afghanistan because there are too many people there who are primarily motivated by blood lust.  They can say it’s about religion, but that’s bullshit.  They just want to kill everyone who doesn’t agree with them.  There is no religion on earth, including Islam, that actually teaches this.

The problem with Afghanistan – and with a very few other “nations” which are basically tribal holdovers from the Bronze Age (having cell phones and AK-47s does not make you “modern”) – is that there is no place for young men.  This is most obvious in the Middle Eastern “nations” going out at far as Pakistan, but you also see it throughout Africa, and you’re going to see it in India and China, very soon, as well. (Although in those two cases it will be because there are simply too many young men.)

(Incidentally … I use the quotation marks because Afghanistan, along with the other tribal societies left on planet Earth, does not have any of the infrastructure or policies, much less the benefits, offered by real nations.  So they don’t get that level of respect from me.)

Why am I so sure of this? Let me give you the three most basic reasons.

First: unemployment.  Young men don’t have anything to do.  They don’t have jobs, because there is no industry.  They are young, meaning they are energetic, aggressive, and impatient.  People with that profile who have nothing constructive to do are very easily led into a life of crime.  That is what terrorism is.  It is crime, and the mullahs who encourage these young men to indulge in it are not religious leaders but crime bosses.

Second: education.  Young men in Bronze Age “nations” like Afghanistan have none.  Many if not most of the young men in tribal societies are illiterate.  Where do you think they are going to learn anything?  From the mouths of mullahs, that’s where.  From the very people who want them (the young men) to think there is some glorious heaven awaiting them if they blow themselves up trying to kill Americans.  These young men haven’t even read the Koran.  They CAN’T.  All they know about Islam is what the crime bosses are telling them.

Third: sex.  Young men in tribal societies can basically only get it by rape.  They don’t have any money or property (see above re: unemployment) so they can’t get married.  And the older men who can afford it take multiple wives, so there are fewer women to go around.  Put a bunch of unemployed, ignorant, sexually frustrated young men together in a room, and how hard do you think it’s going to be to stir them up into doing something violent?  Not very damn hard.

The mullahs are responsible for all three of these factors.  The so-called (and self-identified) “religious leaders” of tribal societies are 100% responsible for keeping young men uneducated, unemployed, and unmarried.  They are getting what they want out of the situation – the world is paying attention to them – even though they produce NOTHING except violence and stupidity.

Islam is not our enemy, and it’s past time we stopped throwing money at it.  Get out of there.  Let those mullahs keep running their young men into walls.  We will lose fewer American lives (and allies) if we just live with the occasional – and it will be *very* occasional, not common, because these mullahs are not so smart - terrorist attack.

Not only that, eventually what’s left of the tribal society is going to get sick of this shit.  They are going to see that they suddenly have so few young men left that women are going to have to start doing “men’s work.”  And if you think women are just as naturally violent and destructive as men, you would be wrong.  Women can be antisocial.  They can be full of rage.  They can be killers.  But they are not, worldwide, history-wide, the group that starts and continues wars.  That would be old men, and the old men are not fighting the wars themselves … they are fighting them with armies of young men.

I don’t think we’ll see world peace in my lifetime.  I don’t think peace is actually a natural state for humans.  The nations that have achieved long-term internal peace are so few they are hardly representative.  The one common denominator that those nations share is that they are secular nations.  They don’t let religion run the government.  Even if they *have* an official religion, which some of them actually do.

Civil law and religious law are not the same thing, and figuring that out is key to being a successful, modern nation.  Afghanistan is about 500 years behind the curve on that.  We can’t teach them.  We can’t show them.  Like any other idiot, they will only learn from their own mistakes.

So I say let’s cut our losses.  Let’s get our people out of there, do what we can to secure the borders, and let the tribes go back to killing each other like they used to.

We can deal with the eventual winner.  It’s not our job to choose that winner.  All the options suck, anyway. If we’re going to do anything, we should be trying to set up an underground railroad to get women out of there.  But trying to impose order?  Trying to “nation build?”  Complete waste of time, money, and lives.

Get out. Now.

willful ignorance and the founding documents

I just had to rant about this.  Actually sat on it for a little while because it was too annoying to address right away … sometimes one must allow the burning rage to subside to a smolder.

An idiot writing in the idiotic National Review (.com) claims that “the Tea Party continues to reshape the political landscape.”  He may be right about that, but apparently he also thinks that the Tea Party represents a return to the Founders’ constitutional principles.

This is so misguided, it’s kind of breathtaking.  The Tea Party has, from the very start, hijacked the language of patriotism and twisted the narrative of American history to support the worldview of a very few, but unfortunately very loud, ideologues who think that this is first and foremost a Christian nation in which the proper role of government is to do absolutely nothing to help any of its citizens except the ones with the biggest businesses.  (But also, illogically, that the proper role of government is to define interpersonal relationships up to and including the one between an adult woman and her physician.  This is the exact same illogic attending the two beliefs, often held in common, that abortion is murder but that capital punishment is justice.)

If you read the Declaration of Independence, you will not find anything in there about corporations.  You will not find anything in there about Christianity.  You will certainly not find anything in there about abortion.  The Tea Party, if in fact it exists and is not just a media shorthand for “far-right social conservatives” (my take), has repeatedly displayed near-complete ignorance both of the facts of American history and of the nature of our “founding” documents.  I would be astonished if any of the blowhards taking the main political stages this year have read any of the Federalist Papers; I would assume that some of them have at least read the full original text of our Constitution, but probably only because it is so short and easily digested.

This is what the Declaration of Independence says.  It was written in 1776 by one of the guys who subsequently contributed to our Constitution.  It really does represent the state of mind of our founding fathers.  It is interesting.  Read the whole thing.  Think about its historical context.  And then ask yourself, do these far-right conservatives really speak for me?  Have they, in fact, understood what this document is?

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html

One thing it isn’t: an outline of government.  It is a statement of protest, not a “we’re going to do things this way” prescription.  It is not law.  It is not even a suggestion of how the thirteen colonies, now characterizing themselves as states, mean to govern themselves.  It’s simply “we’re fed up and we’re not gonna take it anymore.”

Of far more importance to our government, in 1787 and now, is the Bill of Rights.  A good many Americans do not know what the Bill of Rights is.  It’s the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution.  Why did they need amendments right from the start?

“Amendments” does not necessarily mean “corrections.”  Amendments such as those embodying the Bill of Rights are simply additions to the base document intended to clarify and expand upon points which, in the base document, are more lightly covered.  Here is the archives (.gov) page on that.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights.html

This country would be much better off if everyone - most especially every politician - would study this before opening their mouth about our government and what it should do.