Peak Empire: The 99 Percent Solution

All the lessons of history in four sentences:

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Charles A. Beard

Know that peak oil is just the beginning. Just think how much excitement you can have with the ravens of peak water, food, pollution, temperature, and population! [See, for example, Lester R. Brown, Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Scarcity Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures (W.W. Norton & Co., NY: 2005)]

Know that, unlike the shire where Hobbits dwell, the lover’s lane is right smack in the middle of the theater of war. Brownouts will come before the blackout. Mark all the garbage dumps and landfills in your area on a map for your children to use as a resource for metals, glass, wood chips, paper, and anaerobically preserved food among other essentials.

Know that it will take a much bigger upheaval to wipe out humanity. Just how gracefully or ineptly the humanity will survive the energy crisis is the question. Peak empire plutocracy will survive famously; it has more in common with plutocracy in China or the new emerging plutocracy in Iraq than it has with the 99 percent of the citizenry.

The 99 percent can win but it will require great perseverance, education, and education. It will involve great sacrifices, dissent, disobedience, and non-violent resistance to the plutocratic social construct. You may have to steal the “improbability drive” all over again. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_of_Gold]

I write this since I am told some of you do not have the electronic thumb to flag a Vogon ship to go places around the galaxy. Have no fear, and above all “Don’t Panic.” Grab your towel, drink a few beers, and wish real hard for the “heart of gold” to pay you a visit.

Walkabout.

I have three lists, one for community action, one for individual action, and one for useful professions for the 21^st century. I would absolutely love it if you can add to these lists with your comments. [If you see weird numbers in the lists, just put them in your search engine to enlighten yourself with a totally useless concept.]

1. Community Action List

Here is the a-to-z of the best things you can organize about in no particular order.

a. Demand the draft, but only with a loaded lottery that decrees: (i) no one is exempt, not legislator, not the mentally deranged president and his henchmen, not the pregnant mom, not the handicapped priest, (ii) the citizens 35 or older are 3.14159265 times more likely to get drafted,(iii) legislators and high government officials are 3.14159265 times more likely to get drafted, (iv) the members of the families that make more than 10 times the living wage are 3.14159265 times as likely to get drafted, (v) legislators who vote for the war are automatically drafted to serve at the frontlines, and (vi) if there is an on-going war, apply the above rules all over again to send the soldiers to the frontlines.

b. Demand your city or state’s right to opt out of federal adventurism in foreign lands.

c. Demand Equal access to public airwaves requiring all information media using public airwaves to reserve 1.61803399 hours within 6pm to 11pm local time each day for commercial-free free community programming.

d. Demand movement or gathering of citizens shall not be restricted within or without the country for any reason whatsoever.

e. Demand “pursuit of happiness” requiring lawmakers to make no law to regulate citizen’s (a)moral, immoral, or (anti-)social behavior, no matter how contrary the behavior is to their stodgy common sense.

f. Demand population rationing, reserving 1/3.14159265 children for every female for the next 25812.807449 days. Females shall have the right to sell this credit in open market.

g. Demand Carbon rationing at home and among nation-states.

h. Demand taxation pyramid where only the local government receives the say-so to collect the taxes. Only taxes especially collected for specific state or federal services are contributed to the state or federal governments.

i. Demand radical overhaul of property and ownership laws to eliminate obnoxious accumulation of wealth in a few hands.

j. Demand laws that ensure maximum to minimum wealth ratio between the top 2.71828183 percent to the bottom 2.71828183 percent of the population to be less than a factor of 9.80665.

k. Demand laws that ensure maximum to minimum compensation ratio of any organization, business entity, or corporation for its employees to be less than a factor of 9.80665.

l. Demand law to classify Churches and religious organizations as for profit businesses. They sell feel-good opiates for roman candles and golden steeples.

m. Demand all business entities including and especially the information media shall control less than 376.730313461 ppm (parts per million) of its market.

n. Demand all elections be based on (i) direct vote, (ii) “instant runoff,” (iii) public funding, and (iv) require that no one serves in an elective office by more than 8.314472 years over a lifetime.

o. Demand prosecution, instant removal, and perpetual disbarment of government functionaries at all levels who attempt to influence the election process before, during, or after the election.

p. Demand prosecution, instant removal, and perpetual disbarment of government functionaries at all levels who publicly profess or exhibit in speech or in action any association with or belief in any religion or religious cult or organization.

q. Demand prosecution, instant removal, and perpetual disbarment of government functionaries at all levels who (i) attempt to restrict freedom of speech in any way shape or form, or (ii) apply punitive measures to include, but not limited to, withholding of financial and other resources or use legal proceedings for the purpose of suppressing dissent, and (iii) keep lists of citizens in any way shape or form for any reason whatsoever.

r. Demand Anti-secrecy laws that force the government at all levels to be totally transparent to the public by publishing all information regarding the conduct of government in real-time without any hedging or restrictions whatsoever.

s. Demand Anti-law law by requiring that all laws have an expiry date not to exceed 8.314472 years.

t. Demand citizens’ unlimited right to bear arms.

u. Demand citizens’ unlimited right to inquire into and spy on government activities, and disclose of its dealings with groups and people within and abroad with impunity. A citizen cannot commit acts of treason.

v. Support Anti-incarceration laws to limit prison population to less than 376.730313461 ppm.

w. Demand drastic reduction in the laws on books to help drastic reduction or elimination of uniformed forces around town.

x. Demand abrogation of laws that regulate citizen behavior like the drug laws.

y. Demand abrogation of rules, procedures, and laws that institutionalize “pre-crime” persecution or harassment of citizens.

z. Hope you can contribute one more. If there is enough of a response, I will build the best of Community Action a-to-z and post it here.

2. Individual Action List for extra credit

a. If you cannot support a fight with the peak empire plutocracy, move to Dorothy’s Kansas and plan to meet your maker on an accelerated schedule.

b. Move to cities that you can circumnavigate in 3.14159265 hours on foot.

c. Move to cities that have natural water supply.

d. Grow your own food and share.

e. If you are the city Prosecutor, try the real-estate agent masquerading as the mayor of your city on trumped up murder charges.

f. Accept death gracefully rather than spending the last 1 year of your life, attached to sundry tubes in a hospital, wasting resources that the community can’t afford.

g. Learn form the dwindling Native American and African tribes struggling to keep the mammon away from their sustainable enclaves.

h. Demand your grocer/retailer label foods that are genetically modified or grown using unnatural feeds and chemicals.

i. Demand your grocer/retailer label goods and foods that were transported to the store from a distance of more than 100 km.

j. Question law before you obey the rule of law.

k. Learn from the experience of Cuba and North Korea. The two countries went through their peak oil after the fall of the Soviet Russia with greatly different outcomes.

l. Ask your congressman and senator when was the CIA privatized?

m. Hug a child in Kirkuk, Kabul, or Kinshasa and tell him he is more likely to die of hunger or AIDS before he is 18 than the friendly fire from US Marines.

3. Skills for the 21^st century

a. Brewers/vintners to ensure a rambunctious future.

b. Teacher/Researcher, all subjects, to offer education to the public and to develop ideas for an unknown future. The 99 percent will not succeed without a healthy cadre of teachers and researchers.

c. Organic farmer/gardener to rekindling the art of farming without petrochemical fertilizers and heavy machinery.

d. Garbagologist to practice the art and science of harvesting garbage dumps, landfills, and abandoned industrial sites for resources. (It has nothing to do with mudslinging news-people or combing for the social security number in your garbage.)

e. Storyteller/balladeer to enthrall the old and the young with paperless entertainment and history lessons around campfire.

f. Medical doctor/herbalist/healing artist to prepare for a time when energy intensive medical procedures and petrochemical pharmaceuticals will fade away or be too expensive for most people.

g. Market maker for carbon credits. The only booming business to last the century.

h. Militarist. Those who wish to betray the 99 percent can join the military and other security forces to protect the life and property of the plutocrats.

i. Animal husbandry experts to provide muscle power for the farm and transportation.

j. Hunter/archer/gatherer/fisherman for the sustenance of the family and community.

k. Craftsmen/tradesmen of all kinds. Blacksmiths, bakers, millers, carpenters, masons, shoemakers, tailors, tanners, and weavers.

l. Gunslinger cowboys for meat and to keep everybody honest.

Peak Empire: Capitalist Theology and Population

Capitalism, cheap resources, democracy, and population have a very intricate Woody Allen like love-hate relationship with each other. How does one unravel this knot with sweaty hands and bubbly eyes?

Peak Capitalism

The world owes a great debt to imperialism for developing a socio-economic theology that has brought about unprecedented accumulation of power and wealth: the so-called free-enterprise capitalism. It is a system akin to Petri’s Happy Hour which is designed to attract and profit from the top 1 percent of the customers who can afford to stay beyond the end of cheap booze and free peanuts.

It is yesterday’s news that the overclass or the top one percent of the population now makes more than the bottom 95 percent [1]. The unaccounted 4 percent are of course the pit-bulls, also known as the middle managers or pastors, who serve their masters for a little bit more than nothing.

Capitalism loves people, it feeds on people. Peak Capitalism runs on disposable workers and cheap energy. It thrives on relentlessly escalating consumption to serve ever-increasing consumer population. Its mantra of success is exponential growth: exponential growth in the use of resources and energy, exponential growth in the production of goods and money supply, exponential growth in the worker-consumer population. The rabbit is safe, but only if he runs faster than yesterday.

The colonial masters succeeded on the backs of an expanding source of brown and black serfs and slaves as they extended their power to every nook and cranny of the globe. It was the abundance of slave labor and menial classes that helped concentrate wealth and provided the necessary leisure time to spark the industrial revolution. There is no adequate substitute for a butler.

The Church deserves a special mention as the Peak Empire capitalist’s tool of choice: The open-source double-standard Jesus freaks in the Vatican and elsewhere are the vanguard that have led the charge to overwhelm the “so-called” sustainable and bartering communities around the globe. It is their job to soften up the natives into dollar-loving god-fearing free-trading gobble-gobble go-lucky insatiably hungry hordes.

The larger the population, the better. The Church, unlike the nation-state, has a few cycles of feast and famine under its belt since the Roman days. The Vatican is richer than ever collecting roman candles for celibate nuns from the poor who cannot afford the breakfast. “This earth was made for a few, the rest can go to heaven” is the Holy Bull of them all. I am sure the college of cardinals yearns for the days when slavery was the corner-stone of the creed of warring popes! What it wouldn’t do to help the modern day Medici’s. The women are free to work for less, all sanctified by the holy writ.

Democracy

Democracy runs well when (i) there is abundance of cheap resources and (ii) a population well below the carrying capacity.

The carrying capacity, of course depends on the total quantity of the most constrained resource available divided by the “acknowledged minimum” use of that resource per capita [2]. Is it oil or water or both? Just do not forget to include your friendly cats, polar bears, and dolphins in your calculation.

If one factors in human folly into the carrying capacity formula, the “acknowledged minimum” can be replaced by “absolute minimum” without any loss of generality.

The democracy offers a facade of freedom to the citizens. In politics of abundance, if the citizen are taught well in public schools, the teeniest of them will bark like a plutocrat, salute the flag like a hawk, willingly die for the country like a lemming, and unwittingly support the capitalist goal of accumulation of wealth and power in a few hands. Their willing participation is cheaper and more efficient.

Ancient democracies ran on slave power. As citizen population hovered at its carrying capacity and nutrient-depleted fields required increasingly higher input of slave power, the plutocrats were compelled to adopt autocratic form of rule. When you need to starve a population to maintain opulence of a few, democratic accountability does not work too well.

As an aside, it is not all bad for the democracy buffs. The paradigm works in reverse as well. When Western Europe found itself awash with colonial wealth beyond belief, the hold of autocracies crumbled. For example, British history aptly illustrates how the divine rights of the Kings vanished, leaving behind a royal zoo at Buckingham Palace, as resources became abundant at the expense of the colonies and industrialism broke out.

Peak Oil

The current imperial energy binge went into high gear when James Watt introduced his coal-fired steam engine in 1769. It heralded the beginning of the energy revolution. The splurge continues to this day, marred only by a few internal squabbles like the so-called WWI and WWII, and massive genocides elsewhere to keep the sometime unruly warlords in check.

We shall not discuss the coming plateau and eventual decline of available resources, energy really, on a global scale here [3]. Suffice it to say the current oil production is about 83 million barrels per day, and it is highly unlikely it will ever go much higher than that. So if there is an alternate source of energy waiting in the wings, it better come up quick, it better be huge, and it better be dirt cheap. Yes, garbage will work if we can make Professor Brown to come back from the future [4].

Once again we are at the edge of carrying capacity. Once again we are entering an era of chronic shortage of all known useable sources of energy [5]. Once again the plutocracy is arming itself to starve the population to keep its wealth to itself.

I am told humans have this ability to turn it on! When oil is gone, we will find something else, or we will transform ourselves overnight to sustainable localized anarchies, or we will simply wait for the Rapture. I bet a dollar most anarchists will die in the corn fields, shackled and pulling the yoke. And, I bet yet another dollar that if we do find another source of energy it won’t be in time, it won’t be as cheap as oil, and it won’t be as abundant.

Population

The population ties it all together. Cheap resources serve the population, led by the plutocrats who get the lion’s share of wealth and power. Once the genie of cheap resources is out, the capitalist diligently invokes the Faustian principle of exponential growth. There is no turning back: the production, the consumption, and the population all must increase exponentially to maintain economic health. The only way to avoid Malthusian death is to discover a still cheaper set of resources. Increasing population coupled with the depletion of the resources du jour nibble away democracy and freedom. (Prof. A. Bartlett has pointed out before (but not exactly the same words), Malthusian predictions may have been premature, the math is impeccable.) As Romans discovered slave power was unsustainable, so is oil power.

The population has doubled since the 1970s. There are more selfless people contributing to the wealth building process and sleeping hungry on the streets of cities like Calcutta and San Francisco today than there were people in the world in 1930. They have provided the ticket to make space exploration possible. Their unshakable resolve to help the plutocrat’s wealth-building machinery is nothing short of a miracle.

Consider this: In 1960, the oil production was about 20 mb/d and the world human population was 3.02 billion. The prediction is in the year 2040, while the world oil production is expected to fall to the 1960-levels, the world population will be almost 3 times higher to about 8.58 billion [6]. We will need alternate energy source to feed 5.5 billion of them! Not to worry, the politicians, between now and then, expect to rediscover cold fusion with a real punch [7].

We know we have big brains, and that makes us different from bacteria. Yet, our Faustian contract with peak capitalism makes us one.

Let’s dispense with the niceties, shall we?

The Peak Empire proclaims democracy, justice, and equality for all. But runs on a social theology that enriches the plutocrat at the expense of disposable people (working population) and throwaway diapers (consuming population). If you do not like it or cannot hack it, pray. The god is waiting for you on the other side with sexy damsels and honey.

“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security…The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.” [8]

Half a century later, we are there. There is little left on the globe that can be had by political or financial chicanery. Expect to see “straight power concepts” in action: the resource wars are here to stay.

The overclass knows too well the era of abundance in America is in its twilight years. It will be hard to maintain democracy while continuing to accumulate wealth. It is time to starve the citizenry.

Wealth building is a god-given right, and hiding it in nice-sounding words is an essential subterfuge to protect the plutocrats from the unworthy hordes. In polite company it is called the free market democratic capitalism. It runs on growth. It uses population growth as a resource as well as the final destination for rampant consumption. Its purpose is to aggregate huge wealth and resources for the oligarchs. Its tools include World bank, IMF, Haliburton, Microsoft, the organized church, the drug policy, the Patriot Act, military adventurism, and the nuclear option.

Count your blessings and check if your other car is a Lamborghini. If not, know that the offer of an 80-hour work-week to the American families is more than generous, especially when you know anyone can be a millionaire.

Poor sods going three rah-rah-rahs for free enterprise should check-out the latest statistics on their chances to become a millionaire or even their ability to get a degree from a decent school. If you want to be a millionaire, plan to move to Iraq or Russia or central Asia. Destabilized plutocracy in those places offers better odds for the enterprising thief to become a millionaire than the Peak Empire. Upper middle class living in Indonesia or India includes a cook, a maid, a gardener, a driver, and if it is your fancy, a concubine. Stop drooling!

Jevons Paradox [9] is usually applied to the resources like coal and oil of exponentially growing economies. However, peak capitalism treats working-robot-humans as a resource much like oil. With this fresh insight, one can see why the real earnings of working people have been stagnant if not reduced over the years. As workplace becomes automated and efficient, individual robot-human is offered less compensation to maintain body and soul together. While energy (or money) expended to maintain a single robot-human deceases, larger armies are needed to sustain the growth of the economic ensemble. Like the bacteria on a Petri dish, the humans multiply while the going is good [10].

This is the crux of the reason why human population cannot stop growing until it overshoots the absolute carrying capacity. Peak capitalism feeds on institutionalized greed. Which bank would lend you 100 and expect 90 back? What CEO would consciously produce less (using less resources) than the last quarter and expect to survive in his job?

So far the peak empire has had the luxury to maintain disparity between itself and the globe around it a la Kennan[8]. It was relatively less expensive to keep the citizenry happy with bones and democracy. As the world begins to run dry things are changing.

Let us look at the current state of the home of the braves: Does an over-populated oil-hungry peak empire augur well for human dignity, freedom, or democracy?

Is loss of human dignity, the corner stone of the politics of abundance, a big concern of the Empire?

Dignity of the human species is personified in the president, the pope, and Brittany Spear. The girly dress of the Pontiff, the lack of dress on Brittany, and the defaced Mount Rushmore say it all. When was the last time you went sightseeing strip-mines in Pennsylvania? It is a pernicious concept that man-in-the-street needs dignity, especially since it does not help his disposition to selflessly contribute to the osmotic concentration of wealth.

Would you risk your life to climb a coconut tree to get your lunch and barter some to get the penis-erector herbs from the local shaman to engage in big-bam open-air under-the-full-moon sex, or rather participate in a dignified Darwinian struggle with your neighbor to win the right to suck at the barely dripping municipal faucet?

Who wouldn’t want to replace a rather poor sustainable little tribal community in central Africa that has no use for the Monsanto seeds by a metropolis, built around imposing skyscrapers, teeming with AIDS-infested noble Christians who would selflessly give their life-savings to help the pharmaceuticals and the local warlords?

Is loss of freedom a big concern of the Empire?

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, pull back the curtains, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater." [ Frank Zappa]

Well, Frank, it is about time to pull back the curtains.

Is loss of democracy a big concern of Empire?

“…democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive. Convenience and decency cannot survive. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one person matters.” [11]

Some people say we worry that our democratic values are being undermined. This is neither unexpected nor a problem. It is only natural that our dictatorial behavior as the fattest bully on the globe gets duplicated at home to discipline the increasingly poor citizenry. It happened in Rome, it shall happen in Washington.

Does the citizenry know what’s going to hit them?

No. But that is just because I am a confirmed misanthrope. I do promise sometime soon I will say something about what a citizen to do in the coming decades of disorder.

---------

[1] Edward N. Wolff, "Recent Trends in Wealth Ownership," Conference on "Benefits and Mechanisms for Spreading Asset Ownership in the United States," New York University, December 10-12, 1998.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity

[3] See, for example, Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond Oil
The View from Hubbert's Peak, 2005, or Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère, “The End of Cheap Oil,” Scientific American, March 1998.

[4] See the movie “Back to the Future.”

[5] What is not peaking yet is also very telling: the global temperature, the global garbage and sludge production, the world population, the global starvation and disease.

[6] For population estimates see United Nations, “The World at Six Billion,” 1999. For oil statistics, see for example, Ref. [2] above.

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

[8] George F. Kennan, http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/2496/future/kennan/pps23.html, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Volume I, pp. 509-529.

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[10] I am not saying I am proud of it or anything, but here is a limerick I wrote some years ago. (Don’t quibble if the meter is not right!)

Mr burgundy begot a brat on Sundy
One on Mondy, and another on Tuesdy, ...
The earth got hit
With so much shit
It decided to stop spinning on Fridy

[11] Issac Asimov, Bill Moyers’ World of Ideas, 1989]

Peak Empire: Introduction

We are the Empire. We have military bases in 120 countries. We spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined. We have the largest nuclear arsenal.

We are less than 5 percent of the world population but use over 26 percent of the world resources. Our use of energy resources is unprecedented: 100 million BTU per capita per year, about 500-fold more than the yak-driver living in Outer Mongolia. There are individuals and corporations that have more wealth than entire countries. Out of a small office in Shen-zhen, Walmart runs the Chinese economy! We have the Midas touch: General Pervaiz Musharraf was making about USD 10,000 a year before he became the billionaire president.

However, the production of energy, mostly oil and gas, is peaking within a few years, if not already. According to Rex W. Tillerson, President of ExxonMobil Corp.(2004), use of oil has continued to increase by 2 percent per year over the last 30 years, innovations and use-efficiency notwithstanding. By 2030, 120 million barrels per day (mb/d) will be required to sustain the world economy, about 50 percent more than what we produce today. Expect the all time peak oil production to be right around 85 mb/d.

Does this mean the Empire is peaking too? Now? Jeb Bush, 2008? The decadent behavior at its height today may not but last the current generation in power. Expect the teenagers of today to use the guillotine on the aged to avenge for their misfortune.

The economists and the politicians believe in the science to save the American Empire once again. They expect the much-abused scientists to discover the moonshine to feed the dragons of the information age when the world runs short of the oil and gas.

Combine this shrinking kitty of oil and gas with the free-market capitalist bounty-hunting, euphemistically called the economy, that thrives on year over year growth. It gobbles up energy to produce fertilizer to produce corn to produce beef and gasohol to make the empire tick.

The physics of the gobble-gobble capitalism is simple: energy in, garbage out. En route, the human population goes up and so does the disparity between the rich and the poor: the wealthy beget wealth; the poor beget poor children. Every abortion means one less sharecropper.

There are interesting times ahead as humanity readjusts to sunlight and its principal raw product, the biomass. Expect slavery and serfdom to make a big comeback to sustain the local and national oligarchs. Expect the world population to correct itself to pre-oil economies. In the large cities, expect an explosion of Hannibal Lechters, wolfing down their liver but without fava beans and Chianti.

The capitalism has provided the inexorable engine for the osmotic accumulation of wealth and power. Democracy, equality, and justice for all are simply big Goebbelistic words to make the dog-eat-dog realities palatable for the poor sods abroad and at home.

When the poor sod in the land of Oz in poll after poll says he is against the war in I-Raq or elsewhere but does nothing to stop it, you know what he is thinking. He is neither stupid, nor innocent, just clever like a dog with an attention span of 10 seconds and a hefty mortgage. Better them Iraqi children than his SUV. He knows his lifestyle is threatened. He worries about it over his fat-pill breakfast and every time he goes to the gas station. The dog in him is clawing and scratching and hoping his masters in Washington will come up with something. But knows full well in the far recesses of his Pavlovian brain that only a golden pipeline direct from the sun to Dorothy's Kansas can meet his family’s energy guzzling habit.

Under his very glazed eyes, the empire is embarking on its final journey. As foreign resources become scarce and unavailable, industrial skills lost to China, and the global village begins to look vast and insurmountable like dark space, the oligarchy in America shall look inward to realize further accumulation of wealth and power.

The osmotic concentration of wealth has intensified in recent decades: In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Four decades later it is more than 75-fold. Expect the ratio to get even more astounding in the coming years. Expect the peaking empire to squeeze its own citizenry.

The true-blue armed with corporate power are already preparing for the coming class struggle. The tools are all legal, their morality sanctioned by the Lord himself: FCC rule changes to control the media, SEC rule changes to control the markets, the Drug Laws and big prisons to hold the poor derelicts, bankruptcy law changes to squeeze the middle class, Patriot Act to control the would-be unruly terrorists at Kansas State, the quacking courts stuffed with corporate sludge. You name a freedom, and I bet there is a law to squash it.

Karl Marx may yet have the last laugh, but not if the Emperor and his National Guards are vigilant.

Render Them Iraqis

It is very heart-warming to note that we continue to win the war against the Iraqi animals, day after day. This strategy to wage the war in slow motion is important since it keeps the citizens united and mobilized against the Islamists in general and the terrorists and the liberals in particular.

While our kill ratio of 10 to 1 is much better than the Israeli kill-ratio of 3 to 1, it still is a source of irritation, especially since Al-jazeera and other non-democratic institutions continue to show gory details of beheadings and killings along with other scenes of destruction and desolation.

We need to accelerate the process of democratization in west Asia so we can sanitize the war coverage. We know neatly packaged war will take away the disturbing images of holocaust of Iraqi civilians and children and dead US Marines from the bleeding-heart liberals and the pesky soccer-moms who are using it to spread the hate against the supreme love of our Lord for which we invaded Iraq in the first place.

While we are hard at work to instill democracy in Iraq, I think the time is ripe to take the sting out of Al-jazeera and the liberals, and develop a new profit stream to boot. Of course, I am talking about allowing the wartime-corporations to set up rendering plants in Iraq. I think the need is urgent and the profits are a-wasting!

An unnamed rendering industry representative under oath to Congressional Ways and Means Committee stated that it is standard procedure in the civilized world to render the dead, diseased, and other discarded body parts of cows, pigs, cats, dogs, and road-kills into animal feed for ruminants and other animals. [See, for example, http://www.purehealthsystems.com/render.html, http://www.mad-cow.org/~tom/render_ed.html, or http://www.animalsvoice.com/PAGES/archive/food.html] In a lighter moment during the testemony he said, "This approach to sanitize the war using rendering has the ring of Jesuit tit for tat: the ruminats have given us mad cow disease, the Iraqi rendering plants will provide us the opportunity to infect ruminants with human diseases." He added, “the rendering of the Iraqis will not present any technical challenge as their flesh is generally less stringy than the other animals.”

Senators John Paul Johannesburg (R) and Jonathan Swift (D), in a bi-partisan effort, are supporting a $6.8 Billion appropriation bill to field two rendering plants and 300 armored vehicles especially designed to collect the unsightly flesh and bones for rendering. “Operating in concert,” they said in a joint statement, “the armored vehicles can sanitize the area after military cleanup operations by collecting the dead and the dying Iraqis for the rendering plants, leaving little behind for Al-jazeera to feed on. Furthermore, we can save hundreds of millions for the tax-payers by feeding the rendered products back to the Iraqi cannibals.”

House Leader Tom DuLait, a staunch supporter of the rendering bill said, “It is high time the pentagon did something innovative to reduce the tax burden on common Americans. The [Pentagon] should implement a standard policy of war that includes rendering of evil combatants and the use of rendered products as food, and employ the strategy in a year or two when we have to go to war in Iran for the glory of our Savior.”

Amen.

Living on the Diagonal

God is great. God is magnificent.

About 6000 years ago, while enjoying Her three martini breakfast She decided to build a prison.

By lunchtime, She knew it was a stupid idea. But still, frugal with Her materials, She persisted. She drank a couple of bottles of the best Chianti She could conjure up, and smoked the best grass Jesus was saving for the crucifixion day. She found Herself in a chintzy gown, good mood, and ready to think out of the box. She scoured Her pantry and found this little creature on a dusty forgotten shelf, a biped creature with bandy legs that had a brain bigger than its breaches. And She said "Ah-ha" or may be She said "kun-faya-kun," and there it was, a prison teeming with humans.

She saw to it that every copy had a custom made cell of its own. For kicks, She made sure that the cell was not wide enough to lay down fully stretched and the ceiling was not high enough to stand tall. She saw them hunched and in pain. She saw them clawing to break through the walls, the floor, the ceiling. She saw them suffering and angry. And She thought to Herself, "I need to put more thought in this experiment." Not too shy about borrowing, She thought She could learn a thing or two from Goebbels or the 21st century media gurus to make humans believe they were actually happy being miserable. She said "Ah-ha," as lightening struck Egypt that implanted the idea of God in their big brains. She invented rapture. She sold the idea of living fully stretched on the diagonal to every man, woman, and child. Now they labor day and night to compute square root of (x*x+y*y+z*z) and defy gravity. The psychiatrists have a name for the condition when the captive falls in love with the captor (how cute). But who cares, as long as my captor is bigger and better than yours!

She was happy now. She had a sea of champagne for dinner and snorted the best cocaine that Mary was saving to handle the pain of virgin birth. And She shouted with joy, "I am the father, the mother, the son, and never shall the treys surpass my creative self ever again."

War, You Can Bank on It

All wars are instigated by and fought for an elite few, since they know better! You say what about American War of Independence? Sure, it was extremely important to protect the huge profits of the American traders against British taxation to help support the extravagant lifestyle of the common puritan on the street. Where would we be if Thomas Jefferson had died in poverty without impregnating the slaves, or the writing of the constitution, or such. Oh, the Civil War? It provided rich and satisfying jobs to the freed slaves in the coal mines of the North, with an opportunity to match the color of their lungs to that of their skin at no extra cost.

So it is a forgone conclusion that wars have a beneficial effect for the common people: when the hunter makes a kill, the dog gets to chew on the bones. Looking at my dog, I know the bones are tasty and worth dying for!

All wars are fun. Especially the modern ones, with the nicest fireworks ever. But if you are like me, you would enjoy the clean version of the spectacle on the TV. A lot of times I just prefer to see the profits rolling in. That's the best spectacle of them all. I like the ones when our military beats up on the little ones, like those nations in central and south America. We teach them respect, we fumigate the suckers to keep the drug prices reasonable for the common American and their children sick for our pharmaceuticals, the profits keep coming, and the cost of the operation is low. It keeps my conscience cool when profit yield is $100,000 or more for every dead or maimed U.S. Soldier. I generally do not worry about what happens to the psychotic animals on the other side, as long as the little ole American moms do not get to see it on the TV. I do not know why these vermin nations keep opposing our will when their 12-year olds could be making a whole $1 a day working for us.

Sometimes, it is the relatively dispossessed elite that starts the war to change the status quo. It is kind of exciting, just a tinge of fear if you would stay on top. The two big European wars (otherwise known as the World War I and II) initiated by the rouge states (axis powers?), fall in this category. They were too late to the colonial empire building game. It was their own fault, if you ask me. Excluded from the party, the Germans and their friends had the temerity to crash the gates with guns not once, but twice. Their form of government was inferior, their soldiers were more witless than ours, and while God like a good industrialist or politician was helping both sides with praying pastors, he blessed us more. So we won the day. We also had the seemingly endless resources derived from our colonies, including ample supply of gun-fodder like the British Indian Army, that practically guaranteed our success in a long war of attrition. And the profits were good! DuPont made 950 percent more in the first. Neat.

How did we treat our soldiers in the "war to end all wars?" We got them out of their miserable farm life. We put shirt on their back, shoes on their dirty broken feet, and gave them a chance to travel the world. All we asked of them in return was to secure our colonies and profits by killing heathens, the ones who had thrown us out of Europe in the first place. It burns my heart when renegades like General Smedley Butler of the U.S. Marines try to spoil the party. Look how bitter he sounds ("War is a Racket," 1935):

"Thus, having stuffed patriotism down [soldiers'] throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.

All they had to do for this munificent sum was to leave their dear ones behind, give up their jobs, lie in swampy trenches, eat canned willy (when they could get it) and kill and kill and kill . . . and be killed.

But wait!

Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community.

Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance -- something the employer pays for in an enlightened state -- and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left.

Then, the most crowning insolence of all -- he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days. We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back -- when they came back from the war and couldn't find work -- at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!

Yes, the soldier pays the greater part of the bill. His family pays too. They pay it in the same heart-break that he does. As he suffers, they suffer. At nights, as he lay in the trenches and watched shrapnel burst about him, they lay home in their beds and tossed sleeplessly -- his father, his mother, his wife, his sisters, his brothers, his sons, and his daughters. When he returned home minus an eye, or minus a leg or with his mind broken, they suffered too -- as much as and even sometimes more than he. Yes, and they, too, contributed their dollars to the profits of the munitions makers and bankers and shipbuilders and the manufacturers and the speculators made. They, too, bought Liberty Bonds and contributed to the profit of the bankers after the Armistice in the hocus-pocus of manipulated Liberty Bond prices. And even now the families of the wounded men and of the mentally broken and those who never were able to readjust themselves are still suffering and still paying."

How petty!

It is fitting that the winning elite imposes its will on the vanquished. Sure, common people are killed and maimed on both sides of the war. It is the less fortunate G.I. Joe who contracts rectal cancer by sitting on depleted Uranium tank structures (serves him right for sitting on his duff when he should be out killing the heathens) or the lung cancer by breathing in radioactive Uranium dust form shattered bullet-tips. But hey, they get to fight for the lofty principles. They fight for their religion. They fight for democracy. They fight for their Fatherland. They fight for equality and the dictatorship of the proletariat. They fight for truth, beauty, and justice. For me, I like the more practical things in life: money, power, and prosperity of my progeny.

You must have seen all those great-spectacle war movies, haven't you? The ones where the heroes and the kings lead their armies to war. They are always at the head of the warring column till the action begins. What are the chances of survival of the soldiers and that rare stupid king who manage to stay at the front line? None, you say. How come the leaders always escape the onslaught unharmed? And how come, if the King dies in the battlefield, the common soldiers dissemble, throw their arms, and would rather accept slavery than die? Dim soldiers! Do the loftier goals of truth, beauty, and justice die with the king? I am glad the modern wars are much more civilized. The elite and the leaders are never put in the harms' way. They rake in the profits to keep the torch of democracy alight, to build great monuments to the dead, and to buy flowers for the graves. Three hurrahs for the truth, beauty, and justice.

The results of the study whether chanting "God Bless America," "United We Stand," and "Support Our Troops" helps reduce pain, sickness, and suffering of the 19-year old Marines and their mothers are classified. But it must, it helps the war machine.

So the 300 or so million people question is: how come there isn't more fervor and outcry to start new and bigger wars? There is a world of heathen animals out there that must be subjugated for truth, beauty, justice, and profit.

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

"The budget should be balanced; the treasury should be refilled; public debt should be reduced..." -Cicero. 106-43 B.C.

If you take Cicero's advice, you condemn yourself, your family, and the nation to a perpetual state of slavery without reward. Is life worth living without SUVs, heated swimming pools, and takeout sushi?

Of course, Cicero is dead (and) wrong. Also, he failed to make the grade with god who thinks different. (But we can forgive him, he was born before god!) The god promised that "meek shall inherit the earth." Time and again the promise is interpreted by the insightful correctly when they choose to live in "calculated poverty." We as Americans are certainly not the first who have discovered our lavish lifestyle in bleeding poverty.

Let us see. US per capita median income is $16000 (4-person family income is $63278, see (http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/4person.html)
US per capita average income is $32000. Our national debt is over $7 trillion, about $25000 per capita (http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/). Over 40 percent of it owned by the weaker nations around the globe. Since these nations are bankrolling us, they must be rich! But for some weird reason they choose to live poor. (This is proof positive that they are genetically inferior animals.)

We are accumulating debt at a rate of about $2000 per capita per year. In 12 years, more than 50 percent of us will have a debt at least 3 times larger than our income. If we use average income, the picture is a bit rosy: it will take a lot longer, like 30 years before we owe 3 times more than the national income.

Before I proceed any further, let me paraphrase Ohmygod's Law of Improbability: Simply put, it states that human ability to believe goes to zero (0) as the level of exaggeration increases by a factor of three (3). The exact number is e=2.71... but that's another blog.

Applying it to the question at hand, it means our Lordship of Earth will continue its unparalleled rise unabated as we keep selling our treasury bills to increase our meekness. However, what happens when the Law of Improbability limit is reached and the creditor nations become skittish and begin to realize Americans are never going to meet their financial obligations? Do not think it cannot happen: Saddam's greatest sin was that he tried to sell his oil in Euros rather than dollars, and the Indians, financially astute as they are, are already refusing to buy more American treasury bills. When their urge to recoup is bigger than their fear of us, they will want to call in our debt in 12 years or 30. It will begin to disrupt our united front of calculated Christian meekness.

Will we accept this travesty? Will we disinherit the earth? A totally outlandish concept, if you ask me! We shall protect our meekness. We shall fight it with nukes and biochems. We shall send more of our young and stupid to wars. We shall conduct preemptive strikes on terrorist states like France and Spain. We shall re-institutionalize slavery. We shall make the church support the slavery like the good old days. We shall disfranchise the Euro and raid the De Beers diamond vaults to buy back our poverty. We shall keep the title of the meek and the Lordship of Earth. We love our SUVs.

"America über alles"

Greenpeace and Prostitutes

Sailor mongering was rife in the 19th century when brothels sent prostitutes laden with booze onto ships as they made their way to harbor. So they made a law to stop beautiful women from performing their sacred duty.

Today, it is the Greenpeace. The federal government is suing Greenpeace using the obscure Sailor Mogering Law to clip its wings. It is payback time for the environmental group that boarded a freighter in April 2002 carrying illegally felled Amazon mahogany to Miami. The crime of these green geeks is all the more heinous since (i) they call the very beloved George W. Bush the "Toxic Texan," and (ii) they are thwarting trade in green gold (Amazon mahogany) that provides profits better than cocaine to Florida Voters who sorely need this money to feed their under-nourished families.

The prosecutors are threatening that if they fail to avenge this misdeed using a law that has not been used since the Boston Tea Party to muzzle barking dogs, they will use the Patriot Act to break up this Beer Bash to save the Born-again President from its terrorist fumes.

The federal government believes that this crime is worse than (i) homosexual marriages, (ii) white-washing 9/11 by creating a multi-billion dollar entitlement program called "Airport Security", and (iii) expending 18-year old Marines and hordes of Iraqi Animals to secure black gold for generations of Free American Capitalist Cronies.

They believe that generally ill-informed Americans cannot handle free speech. Citing Greenpeace, Senator John Paul Johannesburg in his press conference last week stated that "the free speech is a dangerous weapon that cannot be freely given to people that oppose the government, do not know the name of their Senator, or their god." He further stated that he is planning to insert language to this effect in the omnibus budget bill as a foot note on page 743 on behalf of the President of the United States.

Dark Matters

If you love dark cold nights, you must hope there is not enough of the dark matter. If you are an arsonist or enjoy pyrotechnics, you must be rooting for lots of it. The Deep freeze or the explosive disappearance is all yours if you can stick around a few billion years.

However, when Lord Keynes opined, "In the end , we are all dead," he was talking about a century or two. Limits to Growth, a Club of Rome study puts the Armageddon right around 2170s.

Exponential growth is a quaint little concept. It is well understood in science. It is characterized by overshoot followed by catastrophic readjustment when inputs to the system become scarce or the output waste overwhelms the desired outcomes.

But who cares? The world is run by the politicians and economists. One specializes in selling untruths and half-truths for economic gain and the other is adept at using voodoo math and supply of money to prove existence of flat earth and infinite growth.

Malthus did not know about the existence of oil, but he knew his math well. We are straining our resources to the limit: water, land, energy, you name it. And the waste products are mounting: garbage, global temperature, and population. Yes, population, 6.5 billion and counting.

Most scientist I know are pessimistic about finding new water resources on Mars, or in our ability to move the earth a few meters further away from the sun for its cooling effect, and finding an equally abundant, cheap, and concentrated source of energy as gas and oil in time.

The politicians, caught in their own lies and promises, have no choice but to believe in science. That belief is easy as they have no idea how science works. Or, wait for Armageddon.

The Armageddon in this case is a collapse of the world population to pre-oil numbers, about a quarter of what it is today, and return to local economies, some benign, but mostly feudal and repressive.

Cheer up, the fit and prepared will survive. Others will find solace in Jesus and the real Armageddon and walk off the cliff to commiserate with their maker.