H.G Wells in "The Outline of History, The Whole Story of Man" speculates several times about the lack of printing during the Roman Empire. He is simply unable to understand why the Romans never developed the means to effect printed documents to hold their empire together. He points out that printing was certainly not an unknown concept, as there were seals and insignias embossing every manner of official document, but no mechanized printing of the document.
Printing did not develop then, and the Roman Empire disintegrated because it fell into a long decline due to repeated Caesars followed then by other Emperors of even more incompetence, until it was too late, and poof! The Roman Empire was gone, and the Romans were enslaved by the Barbarians.
We have a new form of printing, and I am taking every advantage of it right now.
Innovations are often like having the lights come on after you've spent an evening whacking your shins during a power outage. What a hell of a difference being able to see where you're going makes. I'll bet I can find those candles now! Let me turn on the lights for you.
President Bush has done the country a great service by stuffing the court system with strict constructionists. Short of hanging all the judges in the country, this is the most beneficial improvement possible that could come to the law as rotten a thing as the law is.
The demonstration of this is in the whole "enemy combatant" invention and what it quite amply shows he did. He gave the country's leaders back the freedom to do anything they want, which, if we had leaders, would be a step forward. Under strict construction, all one has to do is think up a new name for something, and Bingo, faster than you can say, "Pay-Day Lender", or "Oxycontin," it's suddenly all quite legal again. We've erased decades, even millenium of mistakes in handing out liberties and the proscription against them in a farcical balancing act where none of either is due because of the corrupt nature of the courts as well as humanity.
Thanks to G.W. Bush, you are never again going to read in any court decision a judge stating, "[this] amounts to [that]" or, "for all intents and purposes [this] equates to [that]." If it isn't specifically named, written verbatim into a law, it can't be a violation of that law. And if you invent a new name for something, it cannot be proscribed by any existing law. Hold that thought, because we're going to come back to it to find a cornucopia of solutions that will "X" out a lot of our problems almost overnight.
One of the problems of a democracy, one no less so in a Republic, or even in the plutocratic kind of a Republic as is ours, is that it is almost impossible to do something that is unpopular. This is like having a house full of kids and taking a vote about what to have for dinner every night. "Pizza" has become an awfully nauseating word of no small consequence. Our pizza Republic has grown increasingly nauseating in exactly this manner. No one is ever very innovative, because it is unpopular by human nature, and all we get is pizza legislation coming out of the likes of what is squatting in those Congressional offices these days. They're squatters, not innovators.
In the past I've been criticized for taking up an anti-illegal alien, anti-immigration position. I'm for neither, I'm for adequate regulation of same. It's an unpopular stance though, from the perspective of altruist youth, Big Agriculture and Tyson Foods too. I deny I'm racist about my stance, however. This would be the argument of those voracious, pizza-consuming college students around the country. But, I like the Mexicans and all foreigners generally. I'm only for limiting their immigration to exactly the same number of Americans that emigrate to their country, and, some of those college students could be encouraged to fill the vacancy there should they please.
Their are a lot of Americans I would encourage to get out in favor of foreigners, so don't think I'm racist. And Big Business that refuses to pay a living wage or anything approaching it, can have all the immigrants they want for their work force based upon the same equation. If they can get a few Americans to go to Mexico and work, they can replace them with a few Mexican workers here. We don't want to deprive any country the population they have that is capable of both producing for their economy and effecting the much needed reforms of their own despotic governments, do we?
We have to face up to the fact, even if it is unpopular, over-population is ruining the standard of living in every country today. It may be good for the economy, but both over-population and the economy are wreaking havoc on all the beautiful landscapes of this world nowadays. Being a billionaire could not possibly equate to the quality of Twain's first-tourist life as it is portrayed in "Innocents Abroad". There are no unspoiled tourists destinations left in the world, and literally every destination port Twain arrived at in this marvelous journey was unspoiled. The locals hardly even knew what a tourist was then. Twain mentions having been to the Grand Tetons in this era too, circa 1876. What I would give for that experience. It is gone now. It is gone due to over population.
Twain describes for us how wonderful life was in his era of privies and chamber pots. He does it with a scathing condemnation of the crass stupidity of humanity and its obscene and disgusting ways. One can only agree with Twain. He makes us wonder how government could possibly sell any of us on the notion that a good economy and the ever greater population prosperity brings to the world could be a good thing. In his own way, Twain asks us to look inside the monkey cage at the zoo, and ask, would you live in there with our simian cousins, like that? And every now and then he comes back to you and says in effect, "I thought you found the monkey cage unappealing?"
In our world we cannot imagine privies and chamber pots. The flush toilets of the West are seen as something that has greatly improved sanitation... But with a population in the world now surpassing 6.5 billion, one can only wonder what all those human bums defecating and urinating in the water of the planet might eventually achieve, if it hasn't already.
Preferring not to think about it that way, doesn't make it any less true.
Which brings me on that tasty note, rather abruptly but perhaps thankfully, to the one-child policy of China.
The Chinese government took rants and was skewered by every left-leaning group, every right-leaning group and, every Christian organization in this country when they put in place their one-child policy. But, they were way ahead of the game. It will still be decades before they see any elbow room results because, one child still causes a population increase for some fifty or sixty years before the grand parents and the great grand parents start dying off, making room for all the "ones" that have come along in the mean time.
In this light Mexico might be likened not to our questionably democratic neighbor to the south, but better seen as the human puppy mill to our south that it is.
Now, I know it is going to be unpopular again. But every country should develop their own one child policy. The Malthusian equations have not faded in their veracity. And if we don't want every city in our own country, and the world to end up looking like Shanghai, Calcutta or Mexico City, it would be a good time to implement a worldwide one child policy. Otherwise, the planet will end up bursting its human population seams. And, awaiting the fifty or sixty years it takes for grand parents and great grand parents to pass away and allow the incoming generations room enough to breathe.
There are those who will argue it is their right to have as many children as they want. And, yes, for those people it will seem an abridgment of their natural rights. But honestly folks, I'm lactose intolerant in an industrial way. I would not be a favorite in the monkey cage. And, if one works too hard on the premise that what I do with my body is my business, it's my right to blow eight quart farts anywhere I want too. If you need a demonstration of the limitations of the natural rights of man here, just come by, bring a gallon of vanilla ice cream and some homemade pumpkin pie. But bring no matches.
There are a lot of nasty terms for women, but "Nancy Pelosi," a term for a serial birthing machine should become more common. She is despicable. It, and I do mean "it," is hideous and obscene. Morally, I can equate Nancy with nothing less than a serial killer, because that is what any woman who has that many offspring is. They are literally killing the planet for everyone else. They are like the bitches in those hideous puppy-mills. What f--- is your problem, Nancy? And that goes for the rest of you and your freakin' idiot husbands too.
And those who are prone to quoting the Bible, and feel that urge right now, well... Go back to your Bible and read about "locusts upon the land," because that is what Nancy Pelosi's children equate to in the current state of the world, locusts upon the land that take the food out of the mouths of all the other children on earth.
Okay, okay, lesson learned? The lesson here is, THAT is exactly how the Chinese view the problem. Is that where we want to end up? Then get with the program, Mom.
Everyone as well seems a tad too worried about the oil peak. It is an illusion. Well, not wholly an illusion, but there certainly has been a dearth of good ideas about what to do about it.
Dupont recently came out and said genetically-modified is the innovation-answer to bio-fuel. But I'm not sure having seed blown in from half way across the country and sprouting in our backyards will engender an appreciation for flowers that smell of diesel fuel.
Nope. That Dupont solution is a Frankenstein-camel masquerading as a racehorse. These scientists are always ready to blow something up.
There is a better solution.
Every economist will tell you, if the U.S. pulled an Atlantis overnight and sank beneath the waves, the price of a barrel of oil would go to five bucks. This is called supply and demand, and that's just a vast over simplification of much more common human nature and the reality of manipulated markets, but, there is something to be derived from it anyway.
The federal government should quite simply pass a law restricting what price a barrel of oil entering the country could cost. Say, oh... $20.00? By this I mean no oil would be allowed to come into the U.S. priced over $20.00 per barrel. Then, regardless of OPEC or China, Exxon/Mobil or the price of Bio-Fuel, that is what a barrel of oil would sell for on the open market. Oh, the oil producing countries might hold out for a while. But rest assured, when their populations started burning down the capitols of these countries that produce oil, oil would sell for $20.00 a barrel and not a penny more. They would produce a lot more too, because they'd need the money.
The concept of Peak Oil is something Big Oil has been developing and deploying for many decades. They talked up Peak Oil when I was a kid forty and fifty years ago. As I said, it's been around as a market tool of manipulation used by Big Oil for many decades. So, stop being such a sucker for every pretty girl with a smile on her face and a pocket full of posies that smell like diesel fuel. You have one already, and she's way more than you can handle as it is, Macho-Macho Man.
Innovation is often a question of emptying the crap you've learned out of your head before you sit down to address a problem. So, you see, our government leaders have at the behest of Big Oil been killing all those Iraqis, and making our military fight and die in a dubious war for absolutely no sane reason. If not for cheaper oil, and if for a want of innovation beyond Bronze Age market manipulation economics, then why?
Now, let's get back to the illegal immigration problem and address it once and for all. Remember what I said about strict construction of the law? That is going to turn out to be the answer that gives us the solution to this problem.
First of all, the country should be charging every immigrant that wants to come into this country, let's say, a million dollars a head to get in and another million to stay for more than six months. Immigration to the U.S. is a high priority item in almost every human puppy mill country around the world, so why give it away? I mean, face it, there's a premium on living here, and, there are a lot of countries around the world where it's no bed of roses to live, right? I smell a profit opportunity, not an illegal immigration problem.
But, we have twenty million illegal immigrants in the country right now. And many of them have come over here to have what they have been told are American children because they are born here, right? How are we going to deal with this problem, especially as the federal government keeps telling us, these immigrants, even illegal as they are, perform jobs Americans won't do?
Where there is confusion, there is opportunity. And Houston, we have confusion up the ying-yang in our immigration policies.
This is where strict construction of the law comes in. We can straighten out the confusion. There's no law against making these illegals pay for their entrance into this country by working. So we call them illegal immigrant laborers instead of "slaves," and we can make them work their fannies off to pay off their illegal entry into the country, that million bucks I referred to earlier. If they object, well, then they can head on back to South America or what ever human puppy mill country they came from.
I think given this scenario, reinforced by the strict constructionist court system, and, we are likely to see illegals sneaking back out across the border a lot faster than they ever snuck in over it.
We shouldn't just let them go back over the border at the border crossings for free, should we? I didn't think so. On their way out, they should probably be stripped of all their personal possessions and right down to their Skivvies to defray the cost and the ordeal of having to deal with their over population problem. Besides, we've got to get ready for the paying immigrant customer.
We should prepare a handbook for departing illegals fleeing our enslavement of them. It should be a handbook describing to them their global moral responsibility to make of their own country a place we would all wish to sneak into. They could begin by adopting a one child policy, and then reining in their own despotic governments.
Philosophy frees the mind. I'm not doing this for myself. My time will run out soon enough so there's nothing in it for me. Many will say, "Good riddance." To which I will say now, "Adios!"
I write philosophy for the future of all humanity, Americans, Mexicans, Iraqis and the Chinese too. We can make a better world, even a world where there will be no need of national boundaries, but not through the unrestrained growth of conventional economic progress or by growing our populations faster than anyone else can. This is not a race. And if it were a race, we all would be losing.
Oh, Americans! Wake up. Again from H.G Wells:
Three things in particular may be cited to sustain the opinion that this period was a period of widespread unhappiness. The first of these is the extraordinary apathy of the population to political events. They saw one upstart pretender to empire suceed another with complete indifference. Such things did not seem to matter to them; hope had gone. When presently the barbarians poured into the empire, there was nothing but the Legions to face them. There was no popular uprising against them at all. Everywhere the barbarians must have been outnumbered if only the people had resisted. But the people did not resist. It is manifest that to the bulk of its inhabitants the Roman Empire did not seem to be a thing worth fighting for. To the slaves and common people the barbarian probably seemed too promise more freedom and less indignity than the pompous rule of the imperial official and grinding employment by the rich. The looting and burning of palaces and an occasional massacre did not shock the folk of the Roman underworld as it shocked the wealthy and cultured people to whom we owe such accounts as we have of the breaking down of the imperial system. Great numbers of slaves and common people probably joined the barbarians, who knew little of racial or patriotic prejudices, and were open-minded to any promising recruitment. No doubt in many cases the population found that the barbarian was a worse afflicition even than the tax-gatherer and the slave-driver. But that discovery came too late for resistance or the restoration of the old order.
I want to take a moment here to thank The Carolyn Baker Site for having linked to my piece Challenging Academia, which otherwise might not have been as widely read as it needed to be. Carolyn and I will not always agree as to the means, and in fact, I don't always agree with my own means, but her choice to link to this article tells me I will always agree with her as to the ends needed to be accomplished. Thanks, Carolyn.
I foresaw my own death today as I read again of Archimedes being hacked to death by a Roman soldier. It is a fitting wonderment to contemplate for a mere philosopher bent only upon opening the eyes of a few, a few who can then give to all humanity a more resplendent future. I must train myself well now, not to raise a hand and a forearm that might unnecessarily prolong the ordeal. If I have my wits about me then, I will shout out, "Bring it on soldier. Bring it on!" And, I will have my wits about me.
So, bring it on. Time is a-wasting. Only a fool thinks either he or his nation are immortal. We all know, only philosophy is immortal.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
--------------------------------------------------------
