We’re Doomed, But Not by the Asteroid

NASA announced last week that they’ve found a good-sized asteroid on a trajectory that could impact earth in 2040, but by then it may not matter. Our planet is running out of everything but human beings. Fresh water, edible fish, petroleum, and land suitable for agriculture— these are only four items on a seemingly endless list of resources that are essential and finite, but rapidly diminishing. And make no mistake about it, competition for these scarcities has absolutely become a zero-sum game played out between the nations and cultures around the globe. For maybe the last century or two, this has always been the case (to a lesser degree), but until recently the winners in this game could keep their good fortune off the radar as their own dirty little secret— somewhat hidden and unknown to those who were losing out. But those days are gone. Now, with ubiquitous social media and telecommunication, everybody knows what everybody else has got.

For 30 years or more, Americans have been spoon fed on the mythological crapola that much of the world hates us because of our freedom. The real truth is that much of the world hates us because we have the disproportionate lion’s share of access to fresh water, petroleum, and good fertile cropland. Individual freedom in America isn’t a threat to anyone, but the prospect of losing out to a more powerful player in a zero-sum game is very much a threat.

This competition to see who gets the right to deplete the planet’s scarce resources is being played out against the backdrop of an even bigger problem— exponential population growth. In my lifetime (the last 70 years) the global population has more than tripled, going from 2 billion to 7 billion. Current educated estimates put the population at 9 billion within 15 to 20 years, and probably at 10 billion by 2040 when the asteroid may or may not stop the growth permanently. For those who are mathematically ignorant and who don’t understand exponential growth, here’s a little fact. There are more people alive today than the number of people who have died since the dawn of the human race 100,000 years ago. To put it another way, more than half of all the humans who have ever walked the earth are alive and walking the earth today.

Faced with the biggest problem to confront mankind in all of history, the last 10 days in America witnessed something truly remarkable. Two influential institutions came together. The political ideology that gave us Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, and Rush Limbaugh teamed-up with the Italian religion that gave us 1000 years of unchecked child sex abuse, and together they came out against what they consider to be the scourge of modern mankind. They pooled their mutual influence and collective animosity to oppose— drum roll, please— CONTRACEPTION!!!

It just makes you weep with frustration and disappointment. We’re doomed, and not because of the asteroid..

What Is It With American Voters and Texas Politicians?

What is it with the American electorate and Texas politicians? Must be masochism. What else can explain it? Lyndon Johnson— now there was a real piece of work. Granted, he kind of slipped in under the radar as the result of a tragic assassination, and he waited until he was rightfully elected president two years later before he gave us the full-scale version of war in Vietnam, as well as Medicare here at home. That worked out so well that the other party (Republican) decided to tap into the wellspring of Texas politics when they came up with their pick for the election of 2000. And damned if their guy, George W. Bush, didn’t also slip in under the radar, this time as the result of a Supreme Court decision. His legacy to us was a totally needless war in Iraq and the worst economic situation since the 1930s here at home. Score another one for the Texans.

Now it’s Rick Perry’s turn. This guy combines the “real Texan” shit-kickin’ authenticity of LBJ with the “deer in the headlights” cluelessness of George W. Bush. His promise to us is the elimination of Social Security, creationism in the school science classes, and the rejection of pretty much everything that smacks of science or intellect. He hasn’t said yet where he plans to start his own war to take the place of Iraq.

How many times do we need to go to the well in Texas before we learn that the stuff coming out of there isn’t fit to drink?

WTF is Up with Sarah Palin?

I’m starting to really enjoy Sarah Palin. Really. She provides just the right mix of amusement and astonishment that I used to get from a fresh copy of Mad Magazine back in my teenage years, but even publisher William M. Gaines could never have dreamed up something as outrageous as the cartoonish diva from the frozen North. Tuesday night in Obama’s State of the Union speech, Palin must have felt that she hit the mother lode. In the President’s slogan, “Winning the Future,” she saw the acronym WTF, and she made the connection with the same three letters used on her favorite communication medium, Twitter, as raunchy shorthand for “What the Fxxx?” Then Palin immediately posted a video and a tweet to let all her fans know how clever she is. Watching the video, it’s obvious that she was experiencing the same snickering titillation that a pre-pubescent child feels when it first learns that the word, “pussy,” has a double meaning.

Months ago, I decided to give it a rest with Palin on my blog. To use an old cliché, writing about her was like wrestling with a pig. It just made me feel dirty, especially when I knew that the pig actually liked it. But as I said, I’m starting to enjoy her more and more. You don’t hear much from the Democrats about her these days, but now the Republicans have taken up the charge. I think I know why. The Tea Party is a very real problem for the Republican Party, and since Palin seems to be the de facto leader, taking shots at her has the effect of clipping the wing of the Tea Party movement without overtly offending the Tea Party constituents. And god knows, she is such an easy target. I almost feel sorry for the Republicans. George W. Bush was not exactly a modern Jeffersonian version of presidential genius, but Bush was intellectual light years ahead of the Tundra Tootsie.

A Second Miracle for John Paul II?

Being Pope has to be the best job in the world. Unlike the position of a football coach or a corporate middle manager, or any other job you can name where your success depends on achieving positive results to improve the institution that is paying your salary, the job of being a Catholic Pope means you never have to do anything that makes any difference. It’s like being an absolute monarch or an emperor, but with less accountability. If you spout a papal utterance of some kind that condemns birth control and unplanned teen pregnancy at one and the same time, nobody will differ with your convoluted logic because implausible double-speak has always been an integral part of Catholic dogma. Or maybe you denounce homosexuality but totally ignore that same trait in your worldwide clergy. Everything is window dressing because that’s the main part of your job. And when your career finally comes to an end, maybe you can become a saint. As Dana Carvey’s church-lady used to say on SNL, “Isn’t that special?”

All the Vatican needs to make sainthood happen is a miracle or two. No problem. The process employed by the Vatican to find miracles is identical to the process used in the early George W. Bush administration to find reasons for invading Iraq. What’s required is a commitment to the ultimate goal, and nothing more. Then the necessary facts and data are simply manufactured to gain public support for that goal. This process works particularly well with Catholics and miracles because a person who can believe in the virginity of Mary will pretty much believe anything. In the case of John Paul II, the bar is set especially low because of his immense popularity and lifetime celebrity status. He could have taken the path that Pope Benedict has taken and done everything in his power to stop the Catholic priests from molesting little children. That would have been a true miracle. But he didn’t do that. Window dressing was easier for him. And when he needs that second miracle to gain sainthood, the Church can say that he once boiled a potato which came out of the scalding water looking like the face of Jesus.

Examining Just Why, Exactly, Sarah Palin is Electrifying

From the years 1932 until roughly 1964, citizens of the U.S.A. felt positive about their Federal government, and for the most part they invested trust in their elected leaders. But this was only a brief anomaly in the long history of our country, and it ended with Watergate and the Vietnam War before it could take hold and flourish. For most of our national history, the opposite sentiment toward Washington has prevailed and from the earliest years of our Republic, Americans historically viewed their government with suspicion, and even outright contempt. So I guess you could say that the Tea Party movement is really a throwback to another time. What’s new is the emergence of Sarah Palin.

Given this high percentage “anti-government” sentiment, it’s surprising that Sarah Palin hasn’t gained more traction with her message of suspicion and distrust of Washington. Recent polls put her disapproval rating at 55%, with fully 71% of Americans saying that she is unqualified to be the next President. Perhaps the reason for this can be found in the recent Tea Party convention in Nashville.

Never, in my recent memory, has so much adulation and applause been given to such simple utterances about simple-minded solutions to galactically unsolvable problems. Evidently, to be in lockstep with the Tea Party, one needs to believe that a speaker is “electrifying” and “galvanizing” when they observe that the United States Government spends too much, by borrowing too much, in order to deliver too little in the way of problem solutions. Knowing this, Sarah Palin is able to rally her troops by overstating the obvious about Washington. Okay, now we know that the Tea Party “gets it” — the Federal Government is inefficient, and generally doesn’t work as well as it did in the past. The thing is, mainstream Democrats and Republicans “get it” too. The only difference is, Republicans and Dems don’t feel that such self-evident truths are “electrifying.”

My politics are, admittedly, schizophrenic. My objection to Bill Clinton molded me into a rabid Conservative, then eight years of George W. Bush transformed me into a flaming Liberal. And after a year of Barack Obama, I’m now a dejected cynic who believes that America is basically ungovernable, and that even an outwardly decent and intellectual person in the Presidency can have very little positive effect on the problems that face the country today. Sarah Palin, we are told by the Tea Party members, should be elected as our next Chief Executive because she shares a certain folksy commonality with the average person. To this I reply, “Not so fast.” My advice is to go out into the street and talk to a lot of common, average Americans, and then ask yourself if you want your grandchildren to inherit a world that is shaped by the common, average American.

For the record, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and all the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were considered to be aristocratic at that time, and there wasn’t a single man among them who would have qualified today as a common average American. I suspect that none of these founding fathers of our country would fare very well in today’s modern Tea Party, and as the Tea Party goes, so goes Sarah Palin.

Conference on World Affairs

This year’s international Conference on World Affairs was, by far, the best in the last decade, perhaps because so little time needed to be devoted to Bush and Cheney. Subjects covered ran the gamut— global warming, Charles Darwin, black holes in space, Islamophobia, economic meltdown, the demise of newspapers, Rush Limbaugh, dark energy discoveries in the universe, breast cancer, American education, terrorism, international traffic in sex slavery, Mexican drug wars, and the political danger of misunderestimating the Republicans. In the next couple of weeks I’ll be summarizing many of the best ideas that I picked up from this amazing annual gathering of intellectuals.

One of the highlights was a lecture by Bill Reinert, national head of advanced technology for Toyota. His subject, of course, was the auto industry, and his talk can be summarized in three numbers— 17 million, 14 million, and 8.5 million. Last year the global auto industry produced 17 million cars. After the latest round of cutbacks, the global auto industry now has the capacity to produce 14 million cars per year. This year, the global auto industry is on track to sell 8.5 million cars. Do the math. More than any other single element, it’s overcapacity which most frightens auto industry leaders. There are currently 16 auto companies building cars around the world, and Bill Reinert’s educated prediction was that, when the economic crisis has passed, there will be 6 auto conglomerates left to supply the car industry. Don’t look for GM and Chrysler to be among them.

Good Riddance

The nightmare is almost over. Harry Reid (above) expresses the sentiment felt by most of us as the 43rd President prepares to leave office next week. His farewell news conference this morning was vintage George W. Bush as he expressed no regrets, and offered no apology for any aspect of his job performance. He characterized the absence of WMDs in Iraq as a “disappointment,” which is like having a gun pressed against your forehead and being “disappointed” to find out that it’s not loaded. Nevertheless, a quarter of all Americans will miss him. His absolute certitude made him the poster boy for Conservative Christianity—an ideology where it doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong just as long as you’re unwavering in your certainty.

The United States of America will never— ever—again be as morally good, and as successful as it was when Bush took office eight years ago, and some aspects of the American dream have been lost forever. Bush is confident that future historians will judge him kindly, in effect saying that only the passing of time will clear his good name. Actually, I believe that only the passing of time will finally show us how badly he damaged our country.

Media Bias— Is It Real?

As January 20th approaches, the Right Wing radio ayatollahs are even more fanatic and livid than they were on election night. It’s not so much Limbaugh and Hannity who are seething as it is the local Conservative Rush wannabes that bombard their listeners in every large urban market outside of Oregon and New England. Having failed to gain traction with the Antichrist and the born-in-Kenya accusations against Obama, these modern-day Father Coughlins are now obsessed with the notion that Obama was elected only because of Liberal media bias. It’s inconceivable to them that the majority of the American people rejected the Conservative position based on fact rather than misinformation. Here’s my question. What— exactly— is their notion of media bias?

The Katy Couric interviews with Sarah Palin got a lot of television time, and the fact is that Palin’s performance was not digitally altered. What TV viewers saw was reality. Palin suffered greatly for her pathetic attempt to look well-informed, but the same can be said for Caroline Kennedy now that it’s her turn on the target end of the turkey shoot. Palin is Conservative and Kennedy is Liberal, so where’s the bias? Was Jon Stewart considered a media guy or a comedian? Was SNL parody considered media coverage? I would suggest that these comedy outlets lack any kind of political bias, and before the election they went after the candidates based on how ridiculous the candidates looked. I’ve always said that Conservatives just don’t do well with humor.

As for George W. Bush, the worst (and in my opinion, the truest) thing ever said about him didn’t come from the media. “Bush,” it was said, “Is like a combination of the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow, and the Lion in the Wizard of OZ. He has no heart, and no brain, and no courage.” The man who said this was John McCain in the 2000 primary election. McCain isn’t exactly a media mouthpiece.

Democracy depends on having the losing side in an election accept defeat. The Conservatives need to get over themselves.

It's The Battery, Stupid

In 2002, American venture capital invested $4.6 million in the research technology to improve the efficiency of electric batteries, and this was less than what the cosmetics industry invested in research to make better deodorants and hair shampoos for women. By this year (2008), the amount spent in the U.S. on research to build better batteries has grown substantially to about $200 million (estimated for the full year), but this still represents only a fraction of the estimated $3 billion that is spent on battery science around the world.

The majority of the research to improve battery power has always been done in China, Japan, and South Korea— driven by the need for more battery power in electronic items like laptops and iPods, most of which are produced in these Asian countries. The upside to this situation (for the Asians) was that much of this battery technology funneled down to the car industry where it was applied to hybrids at Toyota and Honda. This, in turn, helped give them a ten year head start over our big three American automakers in the rush to market “green” automobiles. As things stand now, we will probably never catch up, and cars will join television sets in the category of items produced exclusively abroad.

It didn’t need to be this way. Unlike cosmetics, batteries involve electricity, and two of the foremost institutions where the behavior of electrons is studied are right here in the U.S.A.— Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge. However, these are run by the Federal Government, and are subject to Federal funding priorities. During the years 2000 up to the present, these physics research facilities have been forced to languish under the same anti-science bias that has crippled the search for stem-cell therapies and global warming solutions. The stumbling block was, and still is, the Bush Administration’s infatuation with scientific ignorance. As the big three CEOs plead for money to save their dying car companies, we all need to remember who to thank for this situation.

Maybe We Can All Make Nice

Last night, at a nationally televised awards ceremony, George W. Bush gave Barbra Streisand a very public smooch on her (right) cheek. Ms. Streisand did NOT recoil in horror, and this sent the subtle message that maybe now is the time for the Left and the Right to bury their differences. As a hardcore Lefty, I would now like to make some concessions of my own to my friends on the Right, and I do this in the spirit of reconciliation. Yes, I do have friends on the Right.

1. In retrospect, Jesse Jackson would have been a terrible choice to be a first black president.
2. Listening to NPR will not, automatically, make you intelligent, and listening to Rush Limbaugh will not, automatically, make you stupid. Those things happen, but they’re not automatic.
3. The fact that the concept of democracy was hijacked by the Neo Cons does not diminish the fact that democracy is still a pretty good system.
4. Labor unions are dysfunctional at best, and destructive at worst. The average UAW member with a high school education earns twice what the average university professor earns with a Ph.D. That situation is just plain nuts.
5. The worst patriotic song ever written will still be a more interesting piece of music than “Hey Jude” by The Beatles.

There! Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, maybe we can all make nice.

The End Of The Libertarian Dream

Pat Buchanan said that the Obama election is symbolic of the end of Conservatism, but that’s not to say that Obama caused Conservatism to end. The credit for that goes to George W. Bush. And if Buchanan is right, then Libertarianism is also finished.

The Siren’s song of Libertarianism, that glittering appeal of little or no government intrusion on our lives, has always held a particular fascination for Americans. One had only to go around the country and count the Ron Paul signs in American front yards to see the depth of the pro-Libertarian feeling, but a nasty reality had set in years before this last election. What George W. Bush accomplished was to give us a peek at an America relatively unfettered by government regulation, and it was not a pretty sight.

The mortgage meltdown and the collapse of Wall Street banking houses, as everybody now knows, was enabled by relaxed regulatory oversight on the part of government people charged with keeping an eye on financial institutions. Nobody disputes that. American citizens, however, now tend to look at the SEC failure as a singularity, not recognizing that the last eight years have seen the disintegration and outright collapse of almost all government oversight functions within almost all regulatory agencies. This should be a Libertarian’s dream, but it’s become a national nightmare.

Because the FAA relaxed plane inspections, airlines like Southwest and American were forced to ground entire fleets and cancel thousands of flights over the span of several days to accomplish repairs that should have been enforced as a matter of routine. Even Libertarians recognize that it’s unsafe to fly on an uninspected airplane. The FDA approved only 18 novel new drugs in 2007, the lowest number in the last dozen years, despite the fact that the pharmaceutical companies had developed more new drugs than ever. Fearful of the embarrassment of another Vioxx, the FDA simply sat on its hands more often than not, basking in the culture of non-regulation that came down from the White House. FEMA showed, during Katrina, what a dysfunctional government agency could really accomplish. It wasn’t much. And make no mistake about it, “Heckuva Job Brownie,” far from being the only incompetent guy in government, was only too typical of the kind of person that Bush wanted. The FCC allowed radio and TV stations to do pretty much whatever they wanted when it came to mergers and consolidations. When it came to CO2 emissions, the EPA allowed American industry and power companies to kick the can down the road. Under the supervision of ICE and the INS, our border with Mexico came to look a lot like our border with Canada. The list goes on and on.

Here’s the deal. Like it or not, we’re not a nation of Thoreaus living at Walden Pond. As the population of many American cities now swells into the millions, and as the services and infrastructure supporting those increased numbers deteriorate, only the government can regulate the mechanisms that keep everything from falling apart. My wife and I travel the world, and I like to see what works in other countries. Four of the best and most successful sovereign nations on earth are the three Scandinavian countries and Singapore. All are tightly controlled by their governments. Conversely, there’s one country that has the hands-off approach by the government that Libertarians would like to see in America. It’s called Pakistan. You’ve heard a lot about it lately, and not in glowing terms. There isn’t a single nation on earth successfully using a Libertarian model, for several fundamental reasons. Cultures are too complex, nations are too interconnected, and institutions— which tend to have all the flaws of individuals— are too self-interested. The Libertarian dream is really nothing more than a nostalgic yearning for simpler times, and those times are gone forever.

Why One American Industry Is Thriving

Within the avalanche of pre-election polling data, two statistics shocked me. According to public opinion samples, 10% of Americans think the country is on the RIGHT track, and 27% approve of the job done by George W. Bush. So I began to wonder how these people would respond to the Obama win, and even more important, I wondered who these people are. Not surprisingly, it turns out that they’re almost all conservative Republicans. Most of them are evangelical Christians, and all of them would describe themselves as patriots. And as for how they’ve responded to the Obama win— they’ve gone on a shopping spree. They are buying guns and ammo, Big Time.

Since last Tuesday, gun sales and background checks for prospective gun owners have increased three fold across the country, and ten fold in certain parts of the country. In my state of Colorado, there have been 1500 background checks completed since the election. That’s 500 per day. Sales of AK-47s have depleted the nationwide supply, but only temporarily. Since the AK-47 is made in China, it’s safe to assume that more are on their way in the pipeline.

It’s reasonable to ask, “Why do so many people feel the need for a household arsenal?” Keep in mind that many of them are in that 10% group who saw the country as being on the RIGHT track before the election. America is on track to lose a million jobs in 2008. The cumulative deficit is now 10 trillion dollars. Almost all of the products we buy come from China, and we are ranked dead last in the industrial world on healthcare and education. But for 10% of our citizens, everything is hunky-dory. They want the comfort of having an AK-47 tucked away in the living room closet just in case the country starts to go downhill.

I’ve been saying for ten years that American politics would look very different if guns were used to perform abortions.

If Obama Is Elected, All Is Forgiven

“If Obama is elected, all is forgiven.” At the 2008 Conference on World Affairs, Wendy Chamberlin (U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan at the time of 9/11) was asked in a Q&A, “What is the rest of the world saying about the upcoming presidential election?” Her response: “If Obama is elected, all is forgiven.”

“Forgiven for what?” you might ask. The short answer is that the world might forgive us for George W. Bush. In case you don’t travel abroad, I can tell you that the United States of America is now the most hated nation on earth (with the possible exception of Sudan, because of Darfur). Naïve self-proclaimed patriots like to say, “Foreigners don’t hate Americans. They love Americans. They just hate our government,” and there was a time when that was absolutely true. But one of the drawbacks of democracy is that— when a president like Bush gets elected to a second term— the electorate must share the blame for everything that happens in the second term. Right or wrong, the world sees the average American as a rich, spoiled, redneck goober, and this can translate into some nasty consequences. Recent statistics (from the FBI unit that monitors foreign crime against Americans) show that 24% of all American tourists traveling in Third World countries report falling victim to burglary or assault.

Since my wife and I write about living conditions in Third World slums, based on our travel experiences to those places, this gets very personal for us. We protect ourselves by wearing jackets emblazoned with the Canadian flag, and we carry luggage with Canadian shipping stickers plastered all over, and we flat-out lie about our citizenship. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, we are Canadians. If Wendy Chamberlin was right, and if Obama becomes the next president, maybe things will change for the better. We can only hope that’s the case.

We The People

We, the people, have spoken. The U.S. voting public bombarded congressional representatives with e-mails and phone calls voicing opinion on the proposed 750 billion dollar bailout to save our financial system, and the opinion ran 80% against approval for the scheme. Congress listened to the electorate and failed to pass the measure. It was a triumph for our democracy and a shining example of the democratic process to the newly democratized people of Iraq. Goody, goody.

Just one small problem. The U.S. is a republic, not a democracy, because the Founding Fathers knew that the American public could be trusted to elect representatives—and nothing more. Modern Americans aren’t smart enough to know that they can decide what to eat BEFORE they actually get to the front of the line in a fast food restaurant. Listening to the voting public’s opinion on something as astronomically complex as the bailout package is like listening to a five-year-old’s opinion on nuclear physics. Hell, even Bush and Paulson don’t understand the ramifications of the bailout plan, and they’re the guys who cooked it up. We, the people, are idiots, and congress needs to take that into account. If 80% of us are against the bailout plan, it probably means the plan is pretty good.

Petroleum Science 101

There’s a political TV ad running in Colorado right now, and it claims that there’s more oil under the Colorado mountains than under the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As Jack Parr used to say, “I kid you not.” Actually, this is more of a half truth than a falsehood. The deception lies in the fact that there’s such a thing as oil—and then there’s OIL. The stuff under the Arabian peninsula is called, “sweet crude.” It’s pure petroleum, and it’s in liquid form. The stuff under the Colorado mountains is called, “oil shale.” It’s petroleum that’s locked into solid rock layers. There’s lots of it, but here’s the deception, the oil needs huge amounts of water and heat to be released from the rock. Colorado, despite its winter snowpack, is a desert environment. There simply is not enough water available to unlock the oil from the oil shale in quantities that would be significant. The required electricity to generate the heat is also in short supply, so the oil is “there,” but unavailable. Petroleum industry honchos aren’t stupid people. They wouldn’t have spent the last half-century investing in petroleum infrastructure on the other side of the planet if their product needs could be met right here in this country (see my blog 7/28). Most of the political rhetoric about unlocking domestic oil sources seems to ignore this basic fact.

Everything about the global energy problem involves possible solutions that are deeply rooted in science and engineering, and thanks to the Christian Right’s influence working through the Bush administration, science has been crippled in the United States during the last eight years. Only 18% of our high school students study any kind of science, and the majority of the world’s scientists and engineers are no longer working in this country. By following influencers like Dobson and Limbaugh, a nation can’t let a fanatic religious and ideological fringe take it back to the Dark Ages, and then expect to face the challenges of the 21st Century with scientific enlightenment. We’re either going to be medieval, or we’re not, and we can’t have it both ways,

Also see: $4.00 Gas—Soon A Cause For Nostalgia

I Just Don't Get It.

I'm confused. Recently, I've been present at two public events of the type that would customarily be kicked off with The National Anthem. At these events, however, the kick off was accomplished, not with The Star Spangled Banner, but with the song, America The Beautiful. Not an anthem, but a song. Just a song. Nevertheless, everyone at the event (everyone but me) stood at attention and placed their hands over their hearts. I felt like an outsider, and I wondered if the day would come when some of the patriotic C&W songs like God Bless The U.S.A. would elicit a similar response. I just don't get it.

This recent experience of mine ties into my feelings about the political news these days. Out of nowhere comes Sarah Palin, a kind of political version of Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, and the country falls all over her because she shoots a hunting rifle. These members of the Palin Posse are pretty much the same people who don't know that John Wayne was never a cowboy. I just don't get it.

Then, this morning, it was announced that Lehman Brothers went belly-up (financially speaking) while we all slept last night. The old banking house went back some 150-plus years to a time before the American Civil War, and it survived The Great Depression, but it couldn't survive the mortgage meltdown that George W. Bush describes as a "sound economy." Much of the mortgage banking business has been nationalized already (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) but evidently the Feds decided at this late stage of the game that nationalizing business institutions didn't look quite right in a free market capitalism. Somehow, the news this morning didn't look much like America The Beautiful, and God didn't seem to be blessing the financial sector of the U.S.A., but I doubt if the Palin Posse paid much attention. I just don't get it.

Here's what I know: all democracies are temporary. No democracy has lasted more than 250-300 years. The democratic form of government goes away when the elected officials cease to put the public good above all else. We all know that, but what we don't know is this: do the citizens in a dying democracy maintain their patriotism to the bitter end? Do they see things the way they want them to be, rather than the way they are? I suspect so. But I just don't get it.

It Will Take More Than Money

The United States government does one thing well— and one thing only. It can spend money like a Doberman can eat a prime rib roast. The U.S. government spends money, not with simple commitment, but with unbridled enthusiasm. So, today, when the Feds took over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, we could all rest comfortably in the knowledge that a huge portion of the mortgage mess would be alleviated by the infusion of good old-fashioned government greenbacks. Never mind that those greenbacks would eventually need to come from inflation-generating government printing presses, or Chinese lenders, or that kind of surreal and mysterious metaphysical transfer system that defers the whole wad of cash into the future, and places it on the backs of our children and grandchildren. For the time being, this particular economic crisis proved that it could be smoothed-over by the one thing the government is good at— spending money.

I wish that all of our problems could be amenable to the same solution. Specifically, I wish that the energy crisis could be solved with big government money. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Pulitzer Prize winning writer and brilliant thinker, Thomas Friedman, is proposing that our energy problems can be solved by something he is calling, the ET revolution. ET stands for Energy Technology. He sees the ET revolution unfolding much like the IT revolution in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when home computers and the Internet transformed the way that we gained and shared information. Friedman’s analogy is interesting, but I see a drawback that might prove to be a deal-breaker. The fact is that 20 to 30 years ago, the majority of the best scientific and engineering minds in the world were doing their thinking and working right here in the United States. Not so anymore. Just like the Nazi regime in Germany drove away the best German scientific thinkers in the 1930s, and pushed many of them across the sea to our shores, so has the Bush administration has pushed scientific thought out of the United States and sent much of it across the sea to Asia. I don’t mean to imply that the Bush administration is the equivalent of Nazism. No way. But George W. Bush and his cronies have created an almost medieval, Spanish Inquisitional, modern Dark Ages where it comes to science— stifling research and even simple discourse on scientific subjects ranging from stem cell therapies to global warming.

Today, our public educational system is a pathetic failure in the teaching of language and mathematics, but it fails even more spectacularly in the teaching of science. Only 18% of high schoolers take even one science class during their years in the classroom. If (as the Republican presidential candidates are proposing) supernatural divine creation is inserted into the school curriculum, scientific learning will suffer even more. So the question is this— if an ET revolution is going to save us from energy catastrophe, then how will the technology (the T in ET) come about without a strong community of scientists and engineers? The answer is that the ET revolution will take place where science has now found a home. Unfortunately, that place is Asia, not the United States.

No Experience Necessary

I’ll admit one thing, Sarah Palin gives a good speech, certainly better than anything that ever came out of the mouth of George W. Bush or John McCain. The Dems continue to hammer her about her lack of experience, and she gives it right back to Obama with the same indictment. So here’s my question, “Who the hell made up the rules and decided that experience was the main qualifier for the job of President?”

Based on the backgrounds of the men who’ve held the nation’s highest office, and looking at their performance, the historical evidence would show that experience counts for nothing in this particular job. NOTHING. The man in government right now with the deepest and broadest experience is Dick Cheney. Before he became V.P. he had gained experience at the governmental department level, the cabinet level within a previous administration, and the congressional level. In addition, he had broad experience in high-level business outside government. On paper, he had it all, and then he became Darth Vader once he got elected on a presidential ticket. Close behind Cheney with their impressive “experience-based ” resumes would be Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, and neither of these two Vietnam-era honchos are being considered for inclusion on Mount Rushmore.

On the other end of the spectrum would fall two men with very little experience, Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln. Their experience (or lack of experience) would be comparable to what we see in Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, but that didn’t stop Lincoln from ending slavery in the country, and Truman from ending racial discrimination in the military. Lincoln and Truman had good intellect, character, and temperament, and these are the qualities that the founding fathers hoped would be the criteria for selecting Presidents down through the history of the country. If the founding fathers had believed that the future of the nation depended on one man at the top with lifetime experience, they would have given us a king. Dick Cheney actually believes that’s what happened.

There simply is no kind of experience that can prepare a President for something like the American Civil War, or Pearl Harbor, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or 9/11. The first three of those crises were faced by men with good intellect and temperament. Not so much with 9/11, and we can see what a lack of intellect has produced there. As American voters, we really do need to look beyond the “experience” baloney, or we’ll keep getting mediocre leaders with fluff-padded resumes and lame brains.

Is Sarah Palin the Future of the Republican Party?

On TV this morning, Republican strategist, Mary Matalin (she’s the one who talks without moving her lips, like a ventriloquist) said that Sarah Palin represents the future of the Republican Party. So here’s what we know so far. If she were to become President, the redneck beauty queen would move to outlaw abortion, and to implement the teaching of creation in the schools. She’s against birth control (she prefers abstinence) for unmarried teenage girls, and she has an unmarried pregnant teenage daughter to underscore her conviction on this point. She doesn’t accept the evidence on global warming. She has publically stated that she hasn’t “focused” on Iraq (those are her exact words), but she intends to get up to speed on this topic (probably with some mentoring from Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pearle, and Dick Cheney). According to Mary Matalin, this is the future of the Republican Party.

Right now, in September of 2008, the United States is ranked dead last within the industrialized world for its quality of healthcare, public education, and mass transportation systems. We’re 5% of the global population and we generate 25% of the world’s garbage and CO2 emissions. The average American voter actually believes the myth that tapping our domestic oil sources will break our dependence on Saudi Arabia. By 2012, 90% of the world’s scientists and engineers will not live or work in the United States, partly the result of the current American anti-science sentiment. On the economic front, the Chinese now buy more U.S. Savings Bonds than do the Americans, and the U.S. dollar is no longer the dominant global currency. Our southern border is, essentially, an open border with Mexico, and the rest of the world considers our foreign policy to be a hypocritical joke. But these are not the primary issues that get mentioned in discussions about Sarah Palin, the future of Republican Party. Nor does the subject of that little trillion-dollar war get mentioned at the RNC, probably because the approval rating for George W. Bush within the convention hall is at 71%.

If you believe the wording of Mary Matalin’s endorsement of Sarah Palin, and then you consider the issues important to this neophyte Alaskan Governor, then the future of Republicanism lies with the abortion and the creationism issues. And why not? These are the only issues totally within the control of government. Everything else is difficult. Here’s the most pathetic thing of all— the abortion and creationism issues will probably get the Republican ticket elected in November. Nobody ever lost an election by underestimating the intelligence of the American voters.

Maverick Government

Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.” He almost got it right, but not quite.

I, personally, look at governments based on three criteria— the economic and health-based well-being of the citizens, the level of civility and mutual tolerance in the behavior of the populace, and a peaceful and positive relationship with other countries. Using those criteria, the very best governments on earth are all kingdoms— primarily those in Scandinavia as well as the progressive Arab kingdoms like Dubai and Abu Dabi. The next tier of governments (based on my criteria) are the majority of the world’s democracies typified by the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the majority of the western European countries. Below those democracies, I would rank the oppressive kingdoms and theocracies which are found throughout the Middle East and the South Pacific. At the bottom of my list would be the Islamic democracies like Pakistan and Indonesia. I also include the democracy of India in this bottom tier, even though India is my favorite place in the world to visit. India is better for tourists than it is for Indians. My wife and I have been to 120 countries, and my personal opinions are based on what I’ve seen for myself.

I think that the reason why democracies don’t rank at the top is that democratic leaders must always do what’s acceptable, and they don’t feel constrained to do what’s best. I write about this, now, because I see Sarah Palin as an “acceptable” candidate. By no stretch of the imagination is she the “best” candidate. McCain gets a pass on this whimsical choice of his because he only needs to pass the “maverick” test. The Republican Party, now, is all about having a maverick on board. It can be argued that Bush and Cheney are mavericks, too. Starting a needless and unprovoked war, and becoming an aggressor nation is certainly a “maverick” thing to do by United States standards. As long as we maintain the delusion that having “maverick” leadership is automatically a positive thing, the progressive kingdoms of the world will stay unchallenged in their ranking at the top.