Counter-Revolution Paid For By

Scott Walker's "easy win" over old line Democrat, Tom Barrett, shows the relative effectiveness of two strategies: buying elections and media, versus organizing "the masses." Maybe there weren't enough of the masses, or there were too many Fox consumers, but buying an election worked, mass organizing didn't. Also, Tom Barrett's moderate stance of "let's reason together," didn't work. He lost this time by more than last time, before Walker slammed public sector unions and women, and students, and, and, and.

Wisconsin was a laboratory for those freed by Citizens United to spend unlimited funds in order to buy the kind of government they want: slashed services, cowed workers and slashed taxes for the wealthy.

And they won. Big.

Walker is a hero of the right. To them, he's someone who stood up to unions, who stood up to uppity women: he called their bluff and cut taxes for corporations. All the outrage, all the organizing, all the demonstrations against him and the Republican coup d'etat comes down to this: Walker won with a higher percentage of the vote than he won in 2010, before he revealed how radical he was.

The real winners are the people I've called the Selfish Class. It's not clear, yet, whether their campaign spending (seven to one versus Democrats, reportedly, 2/3 from out of state, versus 1/4 for Democrats) or the longer propaganda campaign of Fox News and snide talk radio was most important in waging the counter-revolution. Both were paid for by the same kind of people: the selfish class, whether corporate donors, or billionaires wanting to protect and expand what is theirs.

What is clear is that even if Obama ekes out a win in November (18% of Walker voters said they'd support him), it is the selfish class that really won. Walker's agenda was tailor-made by them: bash unions into impotence, humiliate women into 1950's-type subservience and cow dissidents, minorities and students into hiding. Most important: cut taxes on the wealthy to the bone.

Obama may win against Romney by piecing together a coalition of feminists, gays, minorities and enough independents impressed by his anti-terrorist cojones, but you can bet he'll be reluctant to support strengthening unions, or pushing for a real stimulus, or going after Wall Street. He may be marginally better than Romney, but he's not going to undo the counter-revolution.

There is a real divide in this country, and much of the world. The uber-rich selfish class, like Fifth-century Roman Senators, has their hangers-on and their subservient serfs, who have been taught that their heroes' good fortunes will trickle down. And there are the rest of us, who haven't yet accepted the message.

We haven't accepted it, because it isn't true: with austerity, slashed services and increasing inequality, the wealthy will prosper, but, if they prevail, we'll be driven into a centuries-long depression, just like the fifth-century Roman Empire.

Pentagon Propaganda for US?

The Pentagon already shades the truth abroad, with their information services, but that's "psy-war." Now its supporters want to give it the legal right to wage psy war against the American people (The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 (H.R. 5736) to modify the NDAA 2013. It would lift the ban against US government propaganda targeted towards the American people.

The House added this provision to the 2013 NDAA, already obnoxious enough because like the 2012 NDAA, it permits indefinite detention, even of citizens, by Presidential fiat: the NDAA Obama signed!

Has Obama gone over to the dark side? Does the military, or the behind-the-scenes Establishment hold a gun to his ribs, or threaten his daughters' lives? Or was Obama always more hawkish than we knew: his first claim to fame was an eloquent speech against the Iraq War, before it was launched.

The indefinite detention provision has been struck down in Federal Court, a hopeful first step; let's hope the Senate doesn't pass the House bill with the Pentagon propaganda provision.

If it does, we soon won't even know that we've entirely lost what little democracy we have. We could be transformed into a warrior state. War would become a commercial venture, taxes would rise, and services vanish--isn't that the Tea Party dream? The "candidates for intervention" are legion. Even the poorest countries have wealth to extract: resources and possibly businesses, labor and customers. There's a word for this: imperialism.

Yet now, the American military are being forced to cut budgets--so, the DOD propaganda arm could swing into action--using taxpayer dollars--to persuade us the military should be as fully funded as the generals want.

Is that what the elite wants, the movers-and-shakers, the selfish class? It worked for Rome, didn't it? And for the British Empire--for awhile.

Their heydays were when they were economic colossi, when the riches flowing from imperial dominance fueled the rise of a wealthy elite: Rome's Senators built palaces all over the Empire; they became centers of stagnation and impoverization in the Fifth century.

But the US is no longer in its heyday. China, India, Russia and Brazil are growing faster; Chinese influence is rising in every region. Meanwhile the US is the most indebted nation in the world. If the US continues attempting global control, it would have to be on the Chinese dime. How long would China stand for that?

Pentagon propaganda would lead the US to bankruptcy, not world ascendancy; we can't afford more adventures abroad. I wish we could spend most of the Pentagon's billions on redeveloping the national economy; the US could lead the world out of the growing "great recession" and people would have jobs: a billion spent on Defense creates only half or fewer jobs than comparable civilian sectors.

We still have choices, but not for long. A security establishment that can indefinitely detain and spout its own poison would complete our transition to a police state.

Climate Change, Politics and Money

Our political campaigns debate regulation, austerity and stimulus. The multi-millionaires and billionaires funding super-pacs to elect Republicans and Romney abhor taxes and regulations, whether it's building codes, global warming gas emissions or casinos.

Why, they could be on their way to earning trillions if it weren't for "job-killing regulations" and taxes! The Kochs, fossil fuel producers, have been cited over and over for emissions pollution, have paid large fines (small compared to their incomes), and legal fees that probably dwarf the fines: their pac funding dwarfs both. A Texas billionaire is a builder of shoddy developments; he's been sued repeatedly for using inferior materials, and not surprisingly, he's for "tort reform" that would cap jury awards for damages. So, he, the Kochs, and many others donate millions to Romney or GOP-supportive superpacs.

Why do they do this? Simple, in each case, they "donate" to get what they want through Congress and the President--the Congress and President they are buying. And while the money advanced is almost small change to the super-rich, it floods the election process.

What does this have to do with global warming? Warming increased last year faster than expected (3.5% over 2010), and the world is on track to warm 3.5 degrees Celsius; Earth will be a much warmer place than it has ever been since humans evolved. Earth was as warm eons ago, but it's not clear that people can survive it without major disruption and mass die-offs. The reason the earth is warming so rapidly, according to Climate Action Tracker(CAT), is because no nation has even met its (inadequate) targets for cutting emissions, and even if they did, none would be enough to slow global warming. The US's inability to adopt carbon emission reduction programs like cap and trade is symptomatic: Brazil's and Mexico's gestures, according to CAT, are ineffectual or worse. But the world as a whole is even more so: nations appear unable--or unwilling, like the US--to meet their climate change pledges.

The reason for the puny response is political. There is no lack of technology to battle climate change. But private interests are donating funds to prevent its use, and persuade others it's unnecessary. The Kochs, for example, have a stake in preventing programs to ameliorate climate change. Citizens United has opened the financial floodgates, rendering billionaires even more effective at blocking positive action.

The flood from the super-rich parallels the near monopoly of wealth and power of Rome's Senators in the fifth century. Then, everyone else was driven into serfdom; now its wage slavery and debt--if you're lucky enough to get a job--but now the world's people will be corralled into an overheated ditch.

Maybe the billionaires think they can create their own climate-controlled havens to survive?

Attila as Told to his Scribes Just Published

Copy and paste the link I'll provide below and you'll go to Amazon's listing of the Kindle book, Attila as Told to his Scribes.

It's $5 for a very long read. If you like historical fiction, romance and adventure and a deep exploration of a charming megalomaniac, this book is for you.

Attila begins his tale (yes, he tells it to his scribes, it's an autobiography), when he's on the cusp of adolescence, already a warrior, when his father is killed before his eyes. It ends with his death, told by his last scribe and his last bride.

http://www.amazon.com/Attila-Told-his-Scribes-ebook/dp/B00855M90G/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1337727607&sr=1-1

Memorial Day: Molasses Monday

I'm a vet, lucky to be in and out of the Army between our various "Wars," officially "military engagements." Formally, I'm a Vietnam Era Vet, since we began messing with the natives there while I was in the Army, and our "intervention" escalated while I was in the (luckily for me) "Inactive Reserve."

Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, inaugurated by freedmen after the Civil War, celebrating their freedom from slavery, and memorializing the fallen soldiers who helped make that happen.

To me, Memorial Day is a three-day weekend. Even that is less meaningful to me, now, because I'm "retired." No one but Social Security pays me anything for work rendered. So, I'm no more off work on Memorial Day than I was today, Sunday, when I mowed for several hours just to insure that people who come here--a small event space with land--won't be overwhelmingly infested by disease-bearing ticks. On Memorial Day, I'll finish mowing the trails.

All Memorial Day means to me in practical terms is that I won't get mail, and any official business I have to attend to, will have to wait until Tuesday.

But a friend of mine, who's running for Congress as an Occupy-Democrat against a more traditional Democrat in a primary next month, sees Memorial Day as an opportunity to appear to a lot of people in town parades all over the district.

However, there is a military dimension to Memorial Day in larger cities, where military units will parade down main streets.

My experience in the Army in Turkey (electronic surveillance of Soviet missile testing was our mission), led me to realize that our military institution was imperial by nature and racist in its relations to host nationals--unless they were white, like the Bavarians I lived amongst in my second tour. Turks were sufficiently foreign and dark enough that my fellow soldiers spoke of them much the way white southerners used to speak of black people. There was even an equivalent to the N-word to designate Turks: abie, a contraction of the Turkish word, agabey, meaning friend. That's not what it meant, then, to the American soldiers.

So, I'm chary of Memorial Day celebration: it has become a celebration of Empire, when politicians wax eloquent about our "heroic men and women" who paid the ultimate price for "their country."

"Their country" has not been in danger of military attack since Pearl Harbor. The last war in which American soldiers gave their lives really defending "their country," was the Civil War. Memorial Day celebrates war dead, who helped the US win Empire, which is now bankrupting us.

I mourn the war dead, though: what a waste!

Think how wealthy the US would be if we didn't spend about $750 billion a year on our military establishment, more than most countries in the world, combined.

Goose Bumps

There are goose lakes up here, and people lakes. The two often don't mix. If a lake is big enough, it can accommodate both, but if it's a small lake, or a large pond, it's one or the other.

A goose pair settled on our lake about three springs ago, and pretty soon they had five goslings swimming along between them. They looked very proud and were very protective of their brood. But seven geese (the goslings grew astonishingly fast) make a terrible mess for people also using the pond. Goose goo all over the beach, the surrounding lawns, the dock and the float made swimming or sunbathing unpleasant.

The lake wasn't safe for the geese, either. Only three geese survived to fly south. Foxes or coyotes must have killed the others. We have both.

Three geese returned, but if they came back for sentimental reasons, they were silly geese. There are lakes that are safer, with islands, inaccessible to predators. Those nearby lakes are also preferable, because people rarely use them, except to admire from afar.

Those three geese had more goslings, but this time they were lucky, in an ironic way. A film crew came to film a Fourth of July party, staged here before the Fourth, and of course, they shot off fireworks. Being careful, they set them off on the float in the middle of the lake.

That set off the geese parents and their nearly grown children--in an explosion of wings and honkings. They didn't come back.

Now I knew how to drive them off.

Last year and this Spring, I did. A 22 rifle wasn’t loud enough, but a 20-22 makes a loud bang, and the rifle has a telescopic sight. So, shot precisely between the goose pairs, they take off. Serially, there must have been ten or fifteen pairs landing. Only one threesome--the original one?--needed a second shot to be persuaded. A few ducks wouldn't be a problem and wouldn't overwhelm the lake: two geese that become seven would seriously do so, just as the exploding global population of humans overcrowds the ecosystem.

Am I like the anti-immigrant vigilantes that patrol the Arizona and Texas borders with Mexico? In contrast to the geese, immigrants contribute a lot. If there is any hope of maintaining Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs, it is immigrants: they bring youth, new energy, new muscle, inspiring cultures and pride in their new country.

Without immigration, our population would decline and our economy, as well. The US has gained from both the initial exploitation and the ongoing energy of new arrivals since before its founding. The only huge financial success I know who did not inherit, is a naturalized immigrant.

In this way, the US could be just the opposite of fifth century Rome: newcomers could reinvigorate it, instead of destroying it.

A Looming Minority: Demographic Angst

White people will become a minority in the US, since white births have fallen below 50% for the first time in US history. The white majority is past childbearing. That's huge; it may explain a lot of things, like America's political polarization, the extreme anti-immigrant politics of the South and West, the conservative urge to cut funds for services like education--increasingly, they'll be spent on minority kids.

As a New York Times (05/17/12) article pointed out, the younger and older generations won't look like each other, and working together will get harder. It's already hard. There is, now, a split between older voters and younger over education budgets, for example: seniors vote against and vote them down regularly. In one of my towns (I pay taxes in two), the school age population is already markedly more minority than those of voting age, and the budget is voted down more often.

A good portion of the radical right-wing social agenda could be explained by the fear of becoming a minority. Anti-women: yeah, it's those young women of color who are having all those babies, and that's probably because of the breakdown of marriage and the family, which is why they've got to stop gays, too. Stop Obama, too, the black President. Cut government spending, cut jobs and gut public employee rights: sure, minorities and women work for governments disproportionate to their share of the population.

Terrorism and wars abroad? Terrorists are seen as foreign and dark-skinned, even though we've had our own homegrown WASP terrorists, like the Oklahoma bomber, the Washington snipers and so many school shooters. So, we launch a war on Terror, or the mealy-mouthed alternative the Obama administration came up with, and increasingly, it seems, Muslims are targeted and recruited (through sting operations), which somehow translates into Brown people--the ones who are threatening to take America away from the desperate grip of older, "conservative" un-brown people, who want to "take America back."

Corporate conservatives are using all of the above to fund a politics that is all about establishing corporate dominance: eviscerate regulations and workers' rights, and reduce already low, loop-hole-ridden corporate taxes. But they also want to insure they get Government's business, including more and better wars.

Scott Walker of Wisconsin isn't their hero; he's their employee.

However, corporations aren't American; they don't hold any special allegiance to the US. They can be just as exploitative of the US as oil and mining companies have been to nations like Ecuador and the Congo. Corporate money flows to Republican extremists not because corporations are anti-gay, or anti-minority, but because right-wingers will toe the corporate line and most are true laissez-faire believers.

Barbarians ripped off Rome in the fifth century; corporations want to do it here, now.

JP Morgan Chase F..ked Up

Jamie Dimon must be furious! His minions f..ked up. His argument for weakening the Volcker Rule and other regulations just got quashed by the "sloppiness" of his own trading unit.

Maybe Bank of America is too big to be humbled by such a monumental loss, but this was just one trading strategy, supposedly to "hedge" risk of another trading strategy.

Why shouldn't banks be allowed to make bets with their own money? This's why. It's why Glass-Steagall, or something very similar needs to be re-enacted: banks should not be allowed to gamble; only trading companies, without individual depositors should be allowed to gamble like this--and allowed to fail.

Why would that make a difference? BOA wouldn't be so big if it didn't have millions upon millions of depositors, insured by FDIC. If BOA were to fail, because of further "sloppy" gambles, the whole financial system would again be in danger of implosion, a revisit to the disaster of 2008, but probably worse, since BOA is much, much larger than Bear Stearns, etc.

Why shouldn't the federal government regulate these combination banking and trading institutions? Why shouldn't it regulate to minimize risk of another collapse? Is it really good policy to allow these hybrid institutions to maximize risk for the whole economy?

The very fact that this is still a question, says a lot about our political economy. We have only recently climbed a little way out of the hole caused by this kind of financial speculation, yet the power of money is such, that someone like BOA CEO Jamie Dimon, strongly connected to that aforementioned collapse, still has the credibility to argue against increased regulation--and to be listened to, until his own institution proves him dramatically wrong.

The game our elites are playing is dangerous. Banks gamble with money; oil and gas companies gamble with our climate and our water. Isn't that what exploitation of Canadian tar sands, gas and oil fracking in the Northeast US and oil exploration in newly melting Arctic Ocean waters all represent?

They gamble with our future, not just financially and environmentally, but the future viability of US power. If the oil and gas companies have their way, not only will the seas rise by over 50 feet, according to James Hanson, but the US will be stuck in a dinosaur economy, when the rest of the world is racing to create alternative energy.

Maybe that's comparable to Rome's inability to adjust to the new cavalry-driven warfare practiced by Huns and Germanic tribes. For about two generations, the Romans were able to buy them off, buying their services--until they were driven into bankruptcy.

"Patriots," our drive to pump--and burn--even more hydrocarbons--and billions of dollars, will not only destroy the climate, it will bankrupt the Empire! We'll need an even larger military to protect our dependence on imported oil.

The Scream, Icon for Our Era

Edvard Munch's The Scream, or the last privately owned version of it, sold for $119,922, 500.00 yesterday, or just a hair under $120 million, at Sotheby's auction. It is the most expensive painting ever, since the previous priciest, a Picasso, Nude Green Leaves and Bust, sold for "only" $106.5 million in 2010. As someone commented, several of the world's billionaires (there are now 1,226 of them) must have been competing for the canvas. The buyer, so far, remains anonymous.

The Scream is iconic and it is also emblematic of the era. While the US economy grew at an anemic rate, while unemployment is still above 8% (8.1 in April, 2012), the money paid for Munch's canvas beats the world record.

The fastest growing crop of billionaires come from the fast-growing economies of the BRIC countries, not surprisingly, but the US still leads with the most (425) and both China's and Russia's shares slipped from over 100 last year to 95 and 96 respectively, this year, due to the world's slowing economy. The world's richest man, by about a 9 billion dollar margin, is Carlos Slim from Mexico.

So, there are 1226 billionaires in the world, but most people in the world's richest nation, the US, are economically insecure and getting poorer, while Europe is sliding back into recession and has reached depression levels of unemployment in Greece, Spain and Ireland.

The price for The Scream is therefore symbolic of the huge inequalities growing in the world economy, not just the US's. Some people can spend that kind of money on a piece of painted canvas, while the majority of humanity is struggling. I could think of a lot of other uses for $120 million (like jobs for 2400 people), but the painting in question is also emblematic of what's wrong with this picture.

The Scream is disturbing; it doesn't impart good feeling, at all. It may have its own kind of beauty, in its evocation of anguish, but it ain't warm and fuzzy. I don't think I'd want to display it on my living room wall, nor even in an office dedicated to psychological counseling. Its seller, Petter Olson, a Norwegian businessman, said of it:

"For me, (it) shows the horrifying moment when man realizes his impact on nature, and the irreversible changes that he has initiated, making the planet increasingly uninhabitable."

Certainly, the colors of the painting evoke both the anxiety of the figure, and the irreversible damage we are causing to the planet, but it is the power of the figure itself that expresses what humans are beginning to realize: the horrible future that seems to await us.

It's likely the 1200+ billionaires believe they will escape the worst of these changes, but then the Fifth Century Roman Senatorial class assumed that Rome would be eternal, and their exalted place in it would always be secure: obviously, they were wrong.

Attila as told to his Scribes

Attila the Hun, the most powerful man in Europe for almost a generation (circa 433-453), evolves in his account, from romantic young prince betrayed by his uncle, to ruthless conqueror. To his followers, he was famously generous, yet his stay in the Empire as a Roman hostage, he claims, taught him all he needed to know about cruelty and torture. His Roman interlude also motivated him to avenge his father, and to overcome all odds: he became the greatest king of all the Huns and war-leader of a huge confederation of steppe peoples.

This is a fictional autobiography--yes an autobiography …as told to his scribes: what he tells them, what they think, and what he thinks, or sees, when he's telling them. He's not a nice guy, although his tale (based on history and folktales) begins when he is an attractive boy on the cusp of manhood--when he witnesses his beloved father's murder. Attila is a lover and a megalomaniac, an attractive one--up to a point.

Sigidinum and Ravenna taught him to despise urban living; later, nothing pleased him quite so much as destroying Roman cities like Acquilea and Sigidinum (modern day Belgrade).

Of course, Attila's greatest weakness was his thirst for conquest. He was not an imperialist, like Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, nor like the conquistadors Cortez and Pissarro. Nor, like the Europeans and Americans after them. He was partly driven by a prophecy, only half remembered, from his youth. He wasn't interested in holding a piece of land; he only wanted to assert his will, and to carry off the wealth of settled lands. He believed (with some justification) that Roman wealth had been stolen already, anyway. He depopulated a whole region north of the Danube, and kept people out--a buffer for his people's protection, he claimed, but that gave him greater power over them, too. Paradoxically, he often wished he were on the open steppes, where he couldn't see a tent from one horizon to the next.

And, Attila had a weakness for women. He had numberless wives, who he justified as his way to cement ties with his allies and, later, with newly conquered tribes. It was, ultimately, a risky game and his first wife, his queen, Erekan, knew it. And so, finally, did his last scribe--and his last bride.

Attila as told to his scribes, will be out on Kindle soon. I will keep you posted.

Terrorists Everywhere!

Report anything out of the ordinary. Be watchful. Be thankful that the police, especially the TSA, insure that we board airplanes safely, no matter the indignity, and now it's protecting us on trains, buses, even highways.

Surliness with 'an officer' could get you arrested. Then, the Supreme Court says, you can be strip-searched, told to "spread 'em," but all in the name of safety, and to prevent terrorists from taking over--and imposing Shariah law on the rest of us. Whew! Thank God for the 'officers' protection.

Actually, the strip-search is for the officers' protection, as Justice Kennedy's brief makes clear, and the Solicitor General's, too. After listing the astonishing variety of drugs found hidden in suspects' rectums and vaginas, the SG's brief includes this: "inmate hospitalized after trying to smuggle a knife into jail inside his body" and "man arrested for selling bootlegged CD's was found concealing a nine-millimeter handgun between rolls of fat."

So, it's the war on drugs plus fear of terrorism plus prison security that persuaded the Supreme Court to allow strip-searches for anyone detained. What happened to the 4th Amendment? "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures?"

Traffic accidents easily outpace casualties from terror in the US, or Europe. Yet, governments are using the (manufactured) fear of terror to become police-states. The US leads the way.

Now, the NSA, or other government agency, or private corporation, knows all about you: don't believe those privacy statements guaranteeing privacy. First of all, have you read them completely? Maybe the lawyers who wrote them have. NSA, et al, now have the capability, and acquiescence or support/authorization to collect our email, Facebook posts, this blog, anything anyone ever puts on the Internet. Why? Since we're scared of the terrorists, it's easy to whip up political support for all the surveillance we can stand. However, we're really scared because the United States, with the most deadly and mobile military in the world, can't stop the terrorists, and are the terrorists in places like Afghanistan and Yemen.

Freudians call it projection.

Outside the US, America is perceived as brash, undisciplined and dangerous. Our political polarization and surge towards corporatocracy only reinforces that: our imperial bullying has driven many world-wide into seeing the US as the most dangerous nation on Earth.

The US has a penchant to 'fix' international problems through force. Increasingly, it is resorting to covert means: drones, special ops, mercenaries, spies, and in the US, domestic police are adapting the same techniques.

In the late Roman Empire, the less in control they were, the more vicious government agents became--military or police. We appear to be treading down the same slippery slope.

April's Afghan Outrage

Ah, April: time for another Afghan horror. Every month, it seems, someone in the military releases some damning news, or photo, or carries out a massacre or other Afghan scandal.

In January, soldiers urinated on the dead bodies of Afghans, claimed to be insurgents; in February there was the "inadvertent" burning of Qurans, in March there was the massacre of Afghan villagers by a deranged American sergeant.

Now, in April, the LA Times published the photos of American Airborne soldiers posing, and mugging for the camera with the body parts of suicide and IED bombers. The pictures were actually taken in 2010, but the soldier who released them, sent them to the Times this month.

First of all, these horrors were conscious acts by US soldiers. The first and last events: pissing on bodies, and posing, grinning, with body parts, reflects some American soldiers' attitudes towards Afghans, for whom supposedly they were sent halfway around the world to protect. Probably there are many American troops for whom this kind of cavalier disregard for the people of Afghanistan is not acceptable. It wasn't for the soldier who released those photos; he had complained to his superiors that such attitudes contributed to lax security.

The Quran burning, meanwhile, was not "inadvertent" at all. The Qurans in question had been seized from detainees at the large American detention center in Bagram, and according to accounts there, some at least had been used to send and receive messages between detainees: subversive messages.

If you want to prevent detainees from organizing, obviously, those Qurans had to be destroyed, or, at least, shipped out of the country. What was "inadvertent," was destroying them in plain sight, where our Afghan collaborators could see what to any Muslim would be supreme sacrilege and desecration. What was inadvertently revealed was Americans' total ignorance of the people they are supposedly there to protect.

So far, we have no General Dyer, who ordered machine-gunning peaceful Indian protesters during India's independence movement. However, these Afghan incidents are typical for imperialist militaries: the local people aren't quite real; they are so foreign. The incidents underline why Indians threw out the British and why Africans threw out all European colonials, despite the very real improvements all these imperialists made: roads, railroads, schools, hospitals. It's also, why we lost in Vietnam, and the Russians in Afghanistan before us.

These incidents again demonstrate why Americans and NATO have to get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible and why empire, especially now in the 21st century, is unsustainable.

Military might, the Romans discovered, is especially transient when the people are against you. Resistance to the Barbarians was ineffective in part because the peasants were already oppressed: they welcomed new conquerors.

Given the above, it's surprising we haven't yet been thrown out of Afghanistan. Better to go before we have to scramble for the helicopters.

Romney and Mormonism

Already, people are beginning to look at Romney's religion. He's a Mormon, maybe the quintessential American cult, but not just a Mormon; he's a Mormon bishop, who's also given millions to his church.

A friend who knows "Christians," as in the ones in Tennessee or Florida, told me that one of his acquaintances wasn't going to vote for Romney: even though he's black, he voted for W twice. He won't vote for Romney, because he's not a Christian.

Set aside the polygamy thing, which only the ultra-reactionary fringe still practices, Mormonism is not your garden variety Protestantism. It's a revelation religion based on the writings and preaching of Joseph Smith in 19th century America, and it has its own holy books, which reference the Bible, but the way the Koran does: Jesus Christ is the previous prophet; Joseph Smith is the final one.

Mormonism may well become an issue. Not only is there a hit musical comedy on Broadway, "The Book of Mormon," there's a bestselling Mormon mystery novel.

Romney is not at all comparable to John F. Kennedy and Catholicism. Santorum said JFK's speech on religion and government made him want to throw up: Kennedy was a secular Catholic; Romney isn't a secular Mormon; he's a bishop who's all but admitted that he baptized long ago dead people, like Jews killed in the Holocaust: some Mormon even "baptized" Anne Frank!

Why is this important? If evangelicals in the South can't stomach voting for Romney, and therefore don't vote, Obama wins.

If I were a Republican, I'd seriously worry about Romney's Mormonism, especially, if I learned more about it, regardless of whether I was evangelical, or secular. That's why some pro-Obama super-pac may yet go after Romney on precisely this issue: all they need to do is point out how weird Mormonism really is. And what a Mormon bishop does.

I've been very disappointed, and even felt betrayed, by Obama--the Yemeni Pulitzer Prize-winner's detention, just the latest example--but I know he's better than Romney, especially a Romney beholden to right-wing Republicans. Romney is the perfect representative of the 0.01%, except for his Mormonism, but he doesn't even represent the 1%. He's a quarter of a billionaire, and he has not a clue how ordinary people have to struggle to make ends meet. On top of all that, he comes across as an uptight hypocrite.

Obama is less of a democrat than I hoped, but at least, although he's part of the 10%, he has some aspiration to represent the rest of us.

If Romney were elected, it would be the equivalent of the super-wealthy Petronius Maximus' accession to the Imperial throne, upon the murder of his predecessor--arranged by him--triggering the Vandal invasion and the wholesale looting of Rome. Maximus was torn apart by the mob, hours before the Vandals arrived. Rome "fell" 20 years later.

If Obama wins, we may have a bit more time.

Iran Is Not Recalcitrant

Even if Iran were secretly trying to develop the bomb, they would be acquiring it for defense. To fear they would drop it on Israel is to think the Iranians are less rational than even the North Koreans. The most they could do is threaten their non-nuclear neighbors, but even that's unlikely, with the US threatening them if they try. Meanwhile, Israel has several hundred bombs and the missiles and bombers to deliver them.

Even if the Iranians built the bomb, it would be for defense: to prevent the US from trying to force "regime change."

But it's pretty much agreed, by the world's best intelligence agencies, the American and Israeli, that Iran abandoned nuclear weapon development in 2004, and hasn't decided whether to resume it. On the other hand, many analysts believe that Iran has the technological and knowledge capability to build a nuclear weapon, and one of the policy points of contention was that very word, 'capability.' If Iran is to be denied nuclear 'capability,' then there are already grounds for attacking it--and scores of other countries.

What is almost never admitted is this: Iran, as a member of the IAEA, has the international treaty right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, as long as it allows inspections to insure that's what it's doing. Enriching uranium to 20% is for medical use, and as someone with prostate cancer treated by radiation, I believe modern nations should be able to supply their own, and Iran is modernizing.

It is possible that a gold bug's theory, explains why the US is acting this way. Iran has been leading an international movement away from the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. If the movement prevails (it will, eventually, even without Iran), the US would owe debt it couldn't pay, and its strength would be checkmated, because it couldn't credibly borrow the huge sums we now depend on monthly, especially to finance our imperial military.

So, the pressure against Iran may not be what it seems. The conflict isn't really about a few nuclear bombs that do not exist. It's about whether the US remains a viable economic superpower.

It is clear that Iran's leaders don't like us, but then we've been helping Israel and the MEK covertly attack the regime for years. Iran's promotion of a post-dollar international economy fits in with their hostility--and with their experience of the US as a malign international entity, consistently hostile--even when the Iranian regime was more liberal, and inclined to view reconciliation favorably.

Iran is 3.7 times larger than Iraq territorially, is 2.3 times larger in population, and has an effective government not based on one dictator. If bluff and sanctions don't work, war with Iran could be the straw that broke the American camel's back: it could bankrupt the US empire; we'd be facing a replay of Rome's fall in 476.

Fascism Now!

The Late Roman Empire was much like a Fascist state--without the populism. The Senatorial class was legally established as the class with power over government, but not the military. Not by coincidence, the Senators in the western empire monopolized wealth in the three forms in which it was recognized then: land, slaves and gold.

Because of their disproportionate wealth, Senators and their sons monopolized high civilian imperial offices: they bought them. Their wealth enabled them to exploit everyone else. Closeness to government and avoidance of taxation favored wealth accumulation among Senators. Since Senators as a class, also failed to reproduce themselves, estates tended to get bigger and fewer--inherited by the dwindling number of sons, nephews and cousins. They were the 0.01%.

Morally, culturally, or in the realm of "social issues," the Senators were extremely conservative or reactionary. Old ways were better, be it the old Roman religion over newfangled Christianity, social relations between landowner and coloni, performing meticulous rituals maintaining their class, or sucking up to the Emperor.

Fascism may be a mass movement--the Tea Party, for example--but paradoxically, it reveres class divisions with the 'best people' on top. The poor are either powerless, or the "masses" led by the best people. They don't talk of "classes," except as in leftists waging "class warfare," especially, when they try to assert their rights, or their own collective power.

Fascists in Italy and Germany incorporated large corporations in their economic system: they were major beneficiaries, even of the war-economy, with its need for armaments and its supply of slave labor.

In the US, we haven't gone quite that far, but the ground has been laid: unions weak or nonexistent, prisons privatized, a defense industry subsidized by government, the largest defense industry in the world; strengthening security services to the point of arrogance--getting away with strip-searching almost anyone by decision of the Supreme Court! The same court gave corporations the lever to regain control of government, after a 97-year hiatus, and perhaps corporations will--in the person of Mitt Romney, and a Republican leadership in both houses of Congress. Certainly, they are, transparently, the marionettes of the most aggressive anti-government billionaires the world has seen.

The question, the 6 billion dollar question, is: will money and media control buy the election? Or will people finally see, will Obama and Democrats finally articulate the rejection of this overweening security state, this demonizing of the jobless and women, this CLASS WAR being waged by the equivalents of the Roman Senators, waged on all the rest of us.

When the Senators won Roman governance, they reduced everyone else to serfs, and then were swept away by Germanic upstarts, the beginning of feudalism. Where we're headed, though, looks more like Fascism, its modern, mafia equivalent.

Unless Americans can wake up.

Insanity

In November 2012, we will be faced with the choice between a quarter-billionaire who continually re-invents himself politically, and an incumbent who may not be trustworthy either, a casualty of the terror war.

Romney would cut taxes on the wealthy, cut services for everyone else and go to war at the drop of an Israeli's hat. Obama told Yemen to keep a Pulitzers prize-winning Yemeni journalist, Abdulelah Shaye, imprisoned. The real charge against him: he interviewed possible terrorists, making him an "associate" of al Qaeda. According to Obama's new NDAA, associates of al Qaeda can be detained indefinitely.

Shaye crossed Obama, because he proved that the US is waging war in Yemen. The transparent American-Yemeni official fiction: Yemenis were doing it themselves--assassinating opponents with drones only the US had. Many people suspected this was going on, but Shaye was in the field and witnessed it. So, he was doing his job and informing the world; what the best journalists do. And for that he's still held in a Yemeni prison, thanks to Obama's personal phone call to Yemen's President.

On one side there is a plutocrat who will take any position if it will win him GOP votes, and on the other, a former constitutional law professor, who acts as if freedom of the press is a national threat. And he's the signer of the NDAA that gave him this power. He first objected that it wasn't strong enough!

What would happen if Romney were elected? He supports attacking Iran and virtually every other war; he's likely to escalate the one in Yemen.

Who is Obama? On government leaks, he has become more extreme than Nixon, while on economic and social issues he's somewhat sane, compared to the positions Romney has taken to win GOP support.

Some have said that the November election will be between a born-again right-wing Republican and a moderate Republican marked D on the ballot. Romney has compromised anything he ever stood for when Governor of Massachusetts--and his advisor revealingly blurted out that everything Romney said for the primaries would be wiped clean in his General Election campaign (the etch-a-sketch remark). Romney's unabashed hypocrisy is astounding, but he won't be able to hide from it: his primary positions are flying all over the internet, such as his pledge to defund Planned Parenthood as soon as he takes office. Republicans will hold him to it.

Super-pacs will broadcast every slip Romney made, every cockamamie thing he said to win over the right-wing--over and over. They're having to doctor voices and events to get Obama, but super-pacs will do that, too.

Hold your nose, wish there was a viable third party, but know there isn't, then vote, hoping our progression towards what happened to Rome in 476 is slow enough that we can reverse it--if we can Occupy sanity, instead.

US Dysfunction: Who Profits?

We have a nearly dysfunctional political system and conservatives like it that way.

Dick Durban, the Senate Assistant Majority Leader, recently described how he and his colleagues--virtually all Senators and Congress-people--have to go across the street from the Capitol to a bare-bones call center, and spend hours calling for campaign contributions at least several times a week. He described it as his "other job," fundraising.

Now, we have "Super-pacs" and non-profit affiliates collecting many millions of dollars from less than a few hundred multi-millionaires, billionaires and corporations. They are hoping to buy the election of the President, the Senate, the House, and the states. This year billions of dollars may be in play.

There was another period in the US, when the very wealthy virtually owned our government: until the 1901 accession of Teddy Roosevelt to the Presidency. TR's Presidency was a mistake. New York's Republican leadership saw Governor Roosevelt as a troublemaker: they thought they were banishing him to ineffectuality as Vice President. Then, President McKinley, was assassinated and TR became President. He began trust-busting, the beginning of the end of the first Gilded Age, in which "robber barons" boasted of spending money to elect Government to pass laws so that they could make even more money.

The Gilded Age looked much like the late Roman Empire, when the Roman Senatorial class monopolized virtually all the wealth, and used it to protect their own interests: not those of the empire, nor of the other people in it. The latter were reduced to slaves and serfs, and a mercenary military was supposed to protect the Empire and maintain order.

The Fifth Century, the 1890's, it's happening again. But it's not just corruption and class exploitation, this time: it's a complete failure to respond to the most urgent crisis of our era. The inability of Congress to act--brought to you by the corrupt campaign finance and lobbying system--is not only preventing action to alleviate the problem, it's actually promoting policies that will make the problem worse.

Congress has brushed aside any attempt to ameliorate or reverse damaging global climate change. This has happened, even though weather events and scientific data, from ice-cores to global temperatures, to violent storms, to melting polar ice, corroborate not only the global scientific consensus that climate change is happening, but that it's accelerating faster than any but the most radical predictions foresaw. And now, there's an "oil and gas boom" in the US!

Our "robber barons" have bought off Pennsylvania and Ohio, are attempting to buy off New York--allowing fracking anywhere--and along with big corporations that TR would recognize, they are pooling their billions to buy up Congress and the Presidency, so they can amass even more billions, the climate be damned.

We all will be, if they succeed.

Trayvon Martin Does Not RIP

"I'll shoot any White Man who looks like a Republican," said Tim Dillinger, a white male member of what Elizabeth suggested be called our "neighborhood watch" group.

Black families tell about the moments when they have to have "the talk" with their sons, not about sex, but about how a young black man is in danger, because white people see him as dangerous, regardless of how nice or smart or gentle he really is.

Whites see young black men, especially one wearing a hoodie (masking his features, hiding his face), as hoodlums out to do no good: like Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida, who had just gone to get a snack at the convenience store.

I know what Sanford used to be like. I lived in a swamp to the west of town, near Oviedo. It's all subdivisions now, but then, we lived down a sand road from a 70-acre celery field. A crew of local (black) farmworkers picked during the celery season, and it was an assembly line going down the field: picking, processing, packaging and loading celery on a truck for northern markets. The farmworkers told me they worked for about six months, and then went on welfare for the rest of the year.

In effect, the state and local governments' welfare payments subsidized lower celery prices in northern, winter markets. But, of course, local whites saw welfare recipients as shiftless and worthless, a separate caste apart.

So now, in one of those spiffy new developments, with curving streets, cul-de-sacs and guarded entrances, a neighborhood watch "commander" follows an African American youth--against police cellphone advice--may have some confrontation with him, and then shoots him dead.

It's not entirely surprising that in the new Sanford, the police do nothing, even when Zimmerman, the shooter, confesses--no, he reports, claiming Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law and self defense. No one mentions the word 'crime.' A crime was committed here: a young man was killed in cold blood.

Yet, both Rush Limbaugh and President Obama call it "a tragedy."

Why isn't it a murder? How would you feel if the normal was the quote that begins this piece: if white men who looked like Republicans were the ones most in danger of being shot by a neighborhood watch group? In other words, this is all about race; about how black people are always suspicious, and white people are not.

Romans had slaves and free, but of all races, and divided free subjects into honored and humble classes: the US has always had at least two castes: black and white. Now, there are more, differentiated by color and ethnicity. Zimmerman was enforcing caste separation in the way most upper castes do: with violence.

Maybe, with Colorofchange and other groups, Sanford, Florida's police may now know: killing people, even of another race, is no longer acceptable, because we are all people and our other labels don't count.

Democrats, Republicans, Wars and History

Kennedy's main opponent in the primaries, until very late in 1960, was Stuart Symington, also a Senator (from Missouri, endorsed by retired President Truman). He was relatively liberal and later critical of the Vietnam War, though former first Secretary of the Air Force (1947-50); he'd been prominent in standing up against McCarthy's redbaiting. He refused to speak to segregated audiences in the South, while Kennedy did, so Symington lost the South to Kennedy and Johnson--as well as doing less well than Kennedy in the rest of the country.

Symington lost primarily because he was outclassed in charisma, and in organization, but Kennedy was to his right, politically. Johnson was even more conservative--until he became President--but no more warlike. Kennedy campaigned, in the general election, on "the missile gap." Supposedly, the USSR had more and better missiles. Multiple Independently targeted Re-entry Vehicles (MIRV's) were something everyone talked about: reportedly, the Soviets had missiles with 9-10 warheads; we only had 3 on most of ours. Later, we found out: the Soviets didn't have so many, and what they did have were vulnerable (on the ground), while ours were invulnerable (at sea), and way more accurate (that's one of the things my Army duty in Turkey was about finding out--retrieving Soviet missile data, through intercepting their telemetry in missile tests).

Point is, Kennedy was a liberal hawk, who may have deliberately miss-represented the issue to get votes. Symington--and Stevenson--were less hawkish, and didn't compete with Nixon on Defense; Kennedy did, and he succeeded. Probably, that's why we got into Vietnam. Early as President, Kennedy began to meddle in South Vietnam, continuing Eisenhower's policy even more aggressively. In retrospect, people say he would not have dived headfirst into the Vietnam War, as Johnson did in 1964, but that may be a romantic gloss appended after JFK's assassination.

After all, Democrats were more militaristic than Republicans in WWI and II, and also started the Korean intervention, as well as Vietnam. They only became less hawkish with McGovern in 1972 and since--less hawkish than Republicans, anyway.

Carter turned away from McGovern's anti-war policy when the USSR invaded Afghanistan. It's why I voted for a third party candidate in 1980--and regretted it since: Reagan won, of course, and Carter was dubbed "a failure." Reagan began the Republican assault on the New Deal, Fair Deal and Great Society. The assault has been going on ever since, and Democrats are still in retreat, resisting, being only a little less retrograde than the continually more warlike, pro-corporate, anti-union, anti-worker and socially reactionary Republicans.

Reaction has taken the Republicans back to the 1920's, at least: "Taking America back," the Tea Partiers say. That's "back" before WWII created most of the American Empire; it's now in decline, like Rome in the fifth century.

Fragile Economy, Fragile Politics

Email overload, after falling in the lake--again! No, this time it wasn't frozen and I was only in up to my armpits. It wasn't even so cold that I didn't go in again to try to free the goddam raft that's still stuck near the beach. But it was cold; my hands were numb for more than an hour and my feet took hours to warm up, .

So, yeah, I'm tired. I watched TV news shows tonight: I'd have to be tired for that. I even saw a bit of O'Reilly: what a know-it-all, what a snide SOB he is! Both Schultz and Chris Matthews were shrill, the NPR people were understated, but not that interesting. And Piers Morgan, when I was watching, was covering the most inconsequential stuff I've seen on evening news shows. I was looking forward to Rachel Maddow, but some geek was subbing for her, talking about the "trigonometry" of news, and I switched the channel. And then, after Piers Morgan, I turned the boob tube off.

Now, to the substance of what I saw, After the Santorum sweep of Mississippi and Alabama, of course, there was a lot of gossip--on all the channels--about how Romney was having problems, but amassing more delegates than his rivals. More gossip was: how Santorum supporters wished Gingrich would bow out, and the reason he didn't was, as Matthews suggested, because of his outsize ego.

Afghanistan was yesterday's news, Sudan was visited because of George Clooney's interest, not for any other reason, although the situation there is dire. O'Reilly said snide things, still, about Sandra Fluke, and implied that Obama must want higher gas prices.

Which is absurd: it's one thing that could defeat Obama in the election. If oil skyrockets and not only does gasoline, but fuel oil, then the nation's economy, just getting into gear, will have to downshift once again. Yes, I do drive a shift.

The only thing that could win Obama the election then, would be the absolute idiocy of the Republican candidate--if it's Santorum--or the transparent hypocrisy and vacuity if it's Romney.

But it's a real danger. If the economy had to weather an oil shock, because of Israeli threats, or attack, against Iran, or if the hot peace in Sudan continues to disrupt the oil market, or if any number of other things might slow down our shaky recovery, then whichever clown the Republicans nominate might just win. He'd bring a mandate for: cutting the bejeezus out of social programs and "entitlements," bringing "religion" into government, while cutting taxes for the wealthy. He'd also pursue more wars, including the one on women and corporations would rule.

That looks like the 21st century version of the Roman Empire's Fifth Century, you know, the one that ended the western Roman Empire in 476.

Conservative Economic Morality

Conservatives speculate in oil and natural gas, even if they know that fossil fuels contribute to global warming/climate change, because they can make a lot of money. It's moral, they feel, to maximize your money, regardless of the consequences--as long as it's legal. They don't particularly believe there is such a thing as global warming, even if they see the evidence all around them: "natural variations," they say, or "sun-spots." But investing in something that may be a major contributor to even more global warming--like the Canadian tar sands--or fracking for oil and gas, is just what you do, when you know you'll make a killing.

I don't invest in oil. I've lost a few dollars on a natural gas ETF. I've made a few on gold--and lost a lot more on gold mines. As a putative progressive, I shouldn't invest even in the gold, since gold mines are highly polluting. But at least I'm only speculating on the "transition fuel," and losing money on it. No conservative would consider "ancillary" consequences--like an uninhabitable planet, or brutish ensuing generations as worth worrying about.

A conservative resists believing in climate change, because it will, unfortunately, require huge coordination by people---and especially, governments--all over the world. It's probably a conspiracy of the World Federalists (a progressive organization that hardly exists any longer), or of the UNA's (United Nations Associations). I was president of a local UNA chapter, once. Mostly, I did the work for an aging, no longer competent older generation, when I was in my 30's. I'm in my 70's now.

The conservative harks back to the golden age of the pioneer, when every man had to depend on his own skill for survival and winning his riches. World climate regulations are clearly antithetical.

But so is modern life. Attila the Hun was the true conservative. In my book, Attila as Told to His Scribes, (available on this website), he wanted to level cities and saw Roman society as a prison he had to destroy--while profiting from the loot: like Romney, like vulture capitalists.

The conservative movement, in Canada as well as the US, appears to have the same bent, but different methods: they'll kill us with global warming, while they prosper--and build climate controlled domes, perhaps, to escape the consequences. Apparently, Harper's Tories, try to suppress protests against their determination to export tar sands oil world wide--from the Pacific via British Columbia, which resists their pipeline plans, and from the Caribbean, via the Keystone XL pipeline. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Republicans give corporate frackers carte blanche and eminent domain!

"I ain't gonna let no Liberal get between me and the best oil play in the bidness! We gonna make us some money!"

Even if Obama wins, this nation and the world, rush ever more rightward. It might not be progressive to have grandchildren!

Roman Ephesus, Keystone XL and Arctic Oil

Right-wing financial newsletters push investments in oil, and bitumen resources, like Canadian tar sands and even Venezuela's unconventional hydrocarbons, as well as fracking for natural gas. To them, it's a golden opportunity to make pots of money--and nothing else.

They act as if there never was any discussion of global warming, except by impractical people, who just don't want to make money. We've had the warmest years on record and Arctic ice is melting rapidly. There is the violent weather, forecast as a consequence of global warming. There are clear signs of climate change all around us, plus sufficient data, accepted globally except in the US, that it's caused largely by human activity--but these guys can't wait to get their money into the oil deposits newly accessible in the arctic seas!

In the first century, BC, Ephesus was the Asian capital and port for the Roman Empire. There's a page about it on this website. It was one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean world, with a population of 250,000. But it's port slowly silted up, because the surrounding hills were deforested for fuel, to fire the baths, and to build the cement forms needed for Rome's monumental buildings. There is graffiti from that period, memorializing public anxiety by the city's officials that their prime harbor would soon be unusable. Ephesus is now miles from the sea; it was largely abandoned when ships couldn't use the harbor. Afterwards, continued erosion covered the city with enough silt to preserve it; preserved for present day tourists (in Turkey, near Selcuk).

Now, consider: while the counselors cautioned against cutting down all the trees, there must have been businessmen who scoffed and said, we need fuel; people want the baths; you're being impractical. Besides, I can make thousands on this. (Numbers were smaller in those days).

Our "officials" appear much more timid than the Ephesians, because they're faced by the demands of rapacious capital, and the people who play with it to get rich regardless.

Obama's (temporary) blockage of the Keystone XL pipeline is a step in the right direction. A more significant (and painful) step is the movement by developing nations like Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria to nationalize their oil reserves, and limit production, which raises the price for oil. I don't like $4 gas, either. But we'll never get off fossil fuels, to slow global warming, unless higher oil costs drive us to solar, wind and bio-fuels.

It is the institutional power of fossil fuel industries worldwide, which drives our suicidal environmental policy, plus the logic of capitalism, which disregards environmental costs. There is also the military that makes all this possible. Now it's time to throw off their power, and with it, any need for empire.

Alternative energy might enable us not to have to abandon large swathes of this planet as uninhabitable--if we can learn from the Ephesians.

Afghanistan Is Saying Goodbye

When will we get the message? We don't belong there. Many of our soldiers are either Christian zealots, or clueless about the Muslim society in which they're posted. They shouldn't be dying there.

Long ago, in India, there were a bunch of boys, playing a chase game in one of the large markets in Ahmadabad, in Gujarat. Some of the boys were Hindu; others were Muslim. One of the Hindu boys, running through a tiny Muslim bookseller's stall, accidentally knocked a Quran off a shelf; it fell to the ground. That simple mishap started Hindu-Muslim riots that lasted for weeks, and resulted in over a thousand dead.

Muslims in Ahmadabad are urban sophisticates compared to Muslims in Afghanistan. Islam, unfortunately, has never had a Reformation, so its culture is more like the era of the Catholic Inquisition, at the cusp of Europe's modern era, when The Faith was under siege by the Protestant Reformation. In Islam, the besiegers are secular westernizers, and maybe, missionizing Protestants, like American soldiers.

That is the context: the Quran is hallowed by Muslim believers the way the Bible was treated in Medieval Christian Europe, the way the Talmud was viewed in Medieval Judaism. Is it any wonder that Americans are being killed for the intentional burning of many Qurans on a refuse pile outside America's largest, most notorious prison for Afghan terror suspects?

Yes, intentional. Generals and our President have tried to apologize, and have tried to mollify, by claiming the burning was a mistake, but it wasn't a mistake: the burning was intentional. Terror suspects, to communicate with each other, had written notes in the Qurans, according to early accounts. They had also used them to promulgate jihadist messages. In a war like this, the Qurans had to be destroyed.

American soldiers burning the Qurans may or may not have known that they shouldn't broadcast what they were doing, but it's hard to conceal burning sacks of Qurans, when you have Afghans working with you.

Two Americans, working in the inner sanctum of the Interior Ministry, advisors to the Afghan security forces at the highest level, were shot dead by Afghans, probably incensed by the burning Qurans. Other Americans, more exposed, have also been killed. If Americans can be shot behind Interior's layers of security, there is nowhere they can be safe if Afghans are present. So, Americans are confined to their bases. There are riots, protests and killings all over Afghanistan.

So, what does that tell us but: we don't belong there. We never did. The Soviets discovered the same thing in the 1980's, helped, ironically, by our allies, the mujahedeen, who have transmogrified into our enemies: the Taliban.

Afghanistan was the end of the Soviet Empire; it could well be the end of the American Empire, as well. Can we withdraw gracefully, the way the British did after their second try in 1880, or will we be driven out like the Soviets?

Is the US Over-Regulated

I never understood the problem with US regulations before, until they were described in the British Economist: Democrats want to regulate business, so that laissez-faire capitalism doesn't run so wild that it destroys society--something it almost did in 2007-8. Republicans want to regulate behavior, i.e. criminal behavior of the lower classes and minorities, and "free business from regulation." Interestingly, the center-right Economist, sees Democrats' priorities as favorably as Republicans,' but damns both--for the way Americans write their laws and consequent regulations.

One example is the Dodd-Frank bill, which is intended to regulate the finance industry to prevent a replay of the collapse in 2008 that led to the Great Recession. It attempts to cover every eventuality, and every kind of financial practice in excruciating detail--it's nearly 900 pages--before most of the actual regulations are written to implement the law. That one was a Democratic monstrosity, but Republicans have done the same kind of thing regulating abortions, for example: bills, which become laws, have become interminably long, and complex.

It may be that the complexity of American regulatory law reflects the growing complexity of our society, but it may also be that laws are so incredibly complex, because our legal system has become so--Americans are exceptionally litigious.

But there may be another reason. In this rigidifying society, Americans have to protect their status, especially their professional status. Even back in the Dark Ages of the 1970's, when I was an academic, professional jargon was necessary to prove your professional standing. I was criticized for writing scholarly articles in plain English! I knew the same was true for my colleagues in other Social Sciences, the Sciences and especially the Humanities.

Not until I had to deal with things like owning property and putting roads across streams, did I realize that government bureaucracies do the same things. I've glimpsed enough to know that corporate bureaucracies are like this, too. There are special ways of speaking or writing that are required for you to fit in. It's called protecting your ass, and everyone else's: your little fiefdom. This is becoming increasingly important as class mobility declines. People, with fewer prospects of advancement, hunker down and protect what they have.

Lawyers have some of the most arcane jargon and grammatical construction of any of the professions. Yet, it's primarily lawyers-turned-politicians who write our laws, and lawyers-turned-bureaucrats who vet the regulations written by legally trained civil servants.

Is it any wonder that the elaboration of laws, their sheer complexity, their piling on laws upon laws to regulate what one simple ordinance might do, has found its greatest flowering in the US? Judicial or managerial judgement is not to be trusted.

Sharpening class lines, and the brittleness that engenders, became pronounced in Fifth Century Rome: the US seems to be following the same trajectory. Moves to simplify laws and regulations are much needed, but probably won't happen: special interests protect themselves.