Give and Take

It's often noted that many people make the transition from Liberalism in their youth to Conservatism in their more mature years. The quip, often attributed to Churchhill as well as others, that, “The man who is not a liberal in youth has no heart, and if he is not Conservative when he matures he has no head,” is the most famous example of this.

It is also remarked as being strange that few people move from Conservatism to Liberalism. Why is this? Why does it seem to be only one-directional?

Well, the most simple reason might be that when we are young we are used to getting an allowance from our parents – and thus we utilize and praise a system that takes care of us. But when we mature we have to subsidize our own brats with money – and we rarely receive either noticeable gratitude nor better behavior from our reluctant hand-outs. In other words, payback is negligible.

At its most extreme, some youths and liberals do believe Big Daddy or Big Mama should provide everything for their children, so that those provided for can lie back without a care in the world and do nothing to contribute other than spend the money that magically rains down like manna from heaven.

And the most extreme form of Conservatism does consist of bitter, cynical misers who will contribute to police, prisons, teargas and concentration camps – as long as their contributions are voluntary and someone is horribly punished – but they won’t willingly contribute to much else.

These extremists on both sides may well be many in number but they are of little interest once mentioned. Of far more interest is the average citizen who lives in perpetual confusion, vacillating between being the loving, giving sharing individual, and the hard-hearted and hard-headed rugged individualist primarily interested only in his or her own happiness. A quick way of describing this majority might be “I genuinely want to help others.. but only when I feel like it ..and I only want to help those I choose myself.”

This feeling, whether conscious or subconscious is understandable. But it’s no way to run a sophisticated society. If our government, in its folly and its fear of the populace, allowed each of us to choose what should be supported from the common treasury, we might find that public libraries might cease to exist along with orphanages, charity and veterans’ hospitals. Voters already, in their bizarre logic, often vote for longer prison sentences for criminals while voting down bond initiatives for building more prisons!

Americans must and need to live with the painful fact that Washington is, in fact, often more sensible and far-sighted than the average citizen while at the same time being more corrupted, as this sensibility and far-sightedness is largely motivated by the politicians’ desire not to kill the goose who lays all those golden eggs.

The average voter seems to be eternally waving an ax, threatening to kill the goose for any number of selfish private reasons.

You know your reasons and I know mine.

But remember, while your tax dollars go for my Medicare and college scholarships for my kids, my tax dollars go for your prisons, B-2 bombers and napalm. So shouldn’t we all be happy?

P.S. Remember that Truman spent billions to revive war-ravaged Europe and save it from communism with his tax payer funded Marshall plan. And his successor, Eisenhower, did the same for Asia - while at the same time building the Interstate Highway System that mainly benefited rural America in the west with money mainly originating in the urban north east. Socialism or practical farsightedness? Call it what you want.

We're Playing With Fire

Four brief scenes from an American boy’s summer days nearly 60 years ago:

The first, at the age of 5, sitting on the concrete floor of my family’s cellar, carefully lighting one match after the other and watching them burn half-way down, playing with fire for the first time, enjoying the delicious knowledge that if I wasn’t careful I would burn my family’s house down – or at least my fingers. What power I was suddenly in command of!

Another summer day just a year or so later: Bored and walking along a railroad track near my family’s home in the dry hills of southern Wyoming, the silence interrupted only by the clacking of coal trains passing. I suddenly spot a few older boys I knew from the neighborhood. They’re bent over an anthill, cackling maniacally as they use a magnifying glass to burn the ants as they emerge in frenzied confusion from their anthill. I watch briefly with a mixture of fascinated curiosity, before I flee in revulsion, amazed not for the last time by the gleeful sadism of boys.

A year or so later I was introduced to another jolly game. An older boy showed a few of us fellows that if you take a clothes pin apart and reverse the wooden parts with the spring bent just so inside, then tape it back together, you could then insert one of the old fashioned strike-anywhere kitchen matches, head first in the open mouth between the opening of the pegs. If you then pressed down on the pegs, the spring would suddenly hit the match head, both igniting it as well as causing the match to instantly fly 4 or 5 meters through the air, a blazing missile to be avoided. For several weeks we boys warred with each other, as paintballers do today, and our mothers were furious when we came home with scorched hair and singed shirts. Fire was fun!

The last memory of summer folly was being shown, again, by an older boy, that if you take a can, open one end and remove the contents of the can, then make a pencil-width hole in the other end, you could then do the following: fill a pot with water, place the open end of the can down in the water with the end of the can with the little hole sticking up out of the water. You could then place a fire cracker firmly into the little hole, and when you lit it, the explosion, with the help of the water vacuum, caused the can to shoot loudly 10 meters into the air. Rocket science at the age of eight!

I did this many many times. Until one day I didn’t back away quickly enough after lighting the fuse, and the can shot up and hit me in the middle of my forehead. The force was so great that I was instantly knocked unconscious. But before I could collapse to the ground, the water shot up, too, and hit my face, bringing me back to staggering consciousness. For days after I wandered around with a bump the size of a goose-egg on my forehead. That’s the last time I’ve played with fire (..except where women are concerned..)

Yes, we humanoids have called ourselves many things. Homo Erectus – the Upright Man. Homo Sapiens – the Wise(?) Man. Homo Ludens – the Playful man. But perhaps the best description for us ought to be Homo Combustus – the Burning Man.

As is usually noted (by us) Man is the most intelligent of all the earth’s animals. But to be fair perhaps the order ought to be reversed. For no other animal on the planet is dumb enough to play with fire. Not a single one. But we do, and we boastful nitwits take pride in what we believe is our mastery over the most dramatic of the four classical elements.

Fire has always made for drama. The ancient Greeks told us that Zeus was angry with the human race because cunning humans were giving him just the skin and bones of animal sacrifices and keeping the meat for themselves – and so as punishment he kept the knowledge of fire from us. And when Prometheus, a minor god, went behind Zeus’s back and stole fire and gave it to the residents of Earth, Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle devour the unhappy fellow’s liver, day after day through all eternity. I repeat - his liver (..humans years later learned to use fire to distill alcohol.. which eats what? Our livers of course. Clever and farsighted people, those Greeks.)

The Bible tells us God got Moses’ attention with a burning bush, and the all loving Father in the sky rained fire and brimstone down upon the residents of Sodom & Gomorrah, roasting small children alive for the sins of their parents. The Zoroastrians of ancient Persia, too, worshipped fire as the very symbol of God.

Since the beginning of our long and complex relationship with fire, we have learned to heat our homes, which enabled us to spread north to colder climes, to cook our food, which made digestion and the ingestion of more calories easier. We have smelted metal ore to make tools and the beams for tall buildings. We have used fire to make steam for locomotives, and burned fuel in internal combustion engines to move us about. And we have used fire not only to make weapons but to make weapons that make fire, like flame throwers and napalm. And please note, atom bombs are not called atom bombs by those who proudly make them. They call them thermo-nuclear devices!

Yes, Homo Combustus has utilized fire for a wide variety of entertaining and necessary endeavors. We’ve burned heretics and witches at the stake, we burned the initials of our ranches into the hides of our cattle – and slave owners once routinely did the same to their slaves!

And if you think the practice has disappeared, wander into any up-to-date tattoo parlor and you’ll be offered along with tattoos the newest fad – branding! Now one can see happy 16 year-old Bettina, having lied about her age to the tattooer, who really didn’t care, emerging from his shop with Johnny, Jimmy or Brian’s name branded in large welts into her accommodating little backside!
And as for slash and burn agriculture you don’t need to travel to the Amazon to see starving locals employ fire to clear away vegetation. City workers in Copenhagen wander the streets burning thousands of liters of fuel as they scorch away unsightly weeds in the summer time. Other good citizens wander the streets, puffing on rolled up tubes of other types of vegetation, adding their smoke and Co2 to the atmosphere. And speaking of pollution, China needs to open a new coal mine nearly every week just to provide the fuel needed to produce the electricity for all the new computers catering to the Chinese’ growing internet addiction. Just wait until all their coming electric cars are hungering for electricity!

We burn and we burn and we burn.

Even in our literature, our poetry, our sex lives, we burn. “I burn for your burning kisses!” The fires of passion burn “within our hearts” if not in lower regions. We burn with ambition.

Other searing sensations? In Scandinavia those unhappy hopefuls who have been left standing in wait for a date to show up, are said to have been burned away – while we in America just say we’ve been stood up.

And when intelligence services like the C.I.A. or the K.G.B. deliberately sacrificed an agent like a pawn in a game, they were said to have “burned” him. At the moment increasing numbers of employees are being “fired” – an expression which came from being shot out of a canon – which were set afire.

And for generations Danes have loudly and proudly sung about their witch-burning King Christian standing by his tall mast in smoke and vapor, while the English have just as proudly sung
“Bring me my bow of burning gold
Bring me my arrows of desire
Bring me my spears o'clouds unfold
Bring me my chariot of fire
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
'Til we have built Jerusalem”
Yes, the burning bows of the Middle East are missile launchers today, and the chariots of fire are armored tanks. Progress!

But wait a minute. “Enough negativity,” some skeptical readers may well be thinking. “Do we have to hear only about the burning of crosses by the hate-filled Ku Klux Klan or Hitler’s fiery crematorium ovens? Surely there is much good we have gotten from fire? What about the candles on birthday cakes, or at romantic dinners? Or the joyous and beautiful fireworks decorating the sky on New Year’s Eve? And isn’t there a happy hippie festival held every year in the desert of Nevada called the Burning Man Festival, where at the climax a giant human figure is set afire… for some reason or another?”

Well, yes. But as for candlelit romance, why is the harsh light of day not conducive to romance? Too much reality? Because we were only safe from being eaten by wild animals if we engaged in sex in darkened caves?

And as for fireworks, I was one of the hundreds of thousands of idiots assembled on Rådhuspladsen New Year’s eve 1999-2000, celebrating the turn of the century.. (even though technically it was the next year that the new century really began.) At midnight so many fireworks were set off that I really thought we would all be asphyxiated by sulfur poisoning as the heavy blanket of smoke spreading was indescribable. A few minutes into the explosive orgy, a group of young imbeciles began gleefully firing rockets sideways into the packed crowd. I was hit in the leg by one, a very painful experience I can assure you. And when I got home I discovered I couldn’t take my pants off. A piece of cardboard from the rocket had pierced my pants and driven part of it into my calf. I had to yank the pants off and was left with ti-øre sized hole after I dug the cardboard plug out of my leg with tweezers.
Fuck fireworks!

And speaking of colorful conflagrations, what does the Danish nation.. and world television coverage have to look forward to at the climate conference?

Self-righteous autonome-types and other self-proclaimed environmental activists, in their usual exhibition of their lack of imagination and morals, slinging bricks and cobblestones as well as Molotov cocktails at police, filling the air with more smoke, Co2 and petrol fumes, in their hormonal-based rites of sexual and alpha-male lust for power and attention. These same faces would have been seen at similar events down through history, watching with grinning satisfaction as witches, heretics, Jews and Gypsies were burned. Among a certain group of young blockheads the police have become the Jews and gypsies of today, something less than human and deserving of a fiery response (..just as some policemen consider them worthy of a good old-fashioned beating.) We Americans used to burn Vietnamese villages “in order to save them.” Blockhead young Europeans “progressives” will ignite firebombs to make our air cleaner, and in their game of cowboys and indians these flaming arrows will be sent against the wicked cowboys’ water canons!

Yes, we are told November was the warmest in history. Because we burn things. Who can still doubt that this long and ever closer relationship with fire is not also quickening our mad stampede towards destruction?

Will we rise again like Phoenix from the ashes? Or will our fate be one final suicidal self-immolation on the Wagnerian funeral pyre of our egos?

Hitler once screamed at his generals in impatience, “Is Paris burning?”

One day it may well be Paris and Pittsburgh, Beijing and Baltimore, Mumbai and Manchester, Hollywood and Horsens that are devoured by flames.

I understand there are flame-proof asbestos pajamas available on E-bay if you haven’t completed your Christmas shopping.

How Hard Can it Be?

Simon Emil Ammitzbøll’s recent essay entitled ”Sådan Stopper Vi Bandekrigen” (How to stop gang warfare) included several suggestions for both crime prevention and for punishment – suggestions which are highly unlikely to ever be adopted – “Legalized hash and dropping the criminal age to 12 to “better protect the legal rights of the 12 year olds(!)” – and his essay reminds me in many ways of my own that Poliltiken so wisely chose to publish way back in 1994.

My article, entitled Geswifte Løsninger (Swift Thinking) began thusly:

“During the terrible hunger famine in Ireland in the 17th century, Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, published what he called, "A Modest Proposal". In it Swift suggested (..some say with irony.. others are not so sure) that the hungry Irish eat their children (..and in an age without ketchup or mustard!) But because the vast majority of starving Irishmen were too poor to buy his book, as far as we know only a small percentage of the population followed his advice.

But however sarcastic Swift's reaction was to a tragedy that genuinely troubled him, he was also pointing out to us that no one has yet found a problem, no matter how complicated or terrible, that is totally lacking a solution. The dilemma many times is that we don't like the solutions we are left with. Instead we invariably urge the implementation of more pleasant pseudo-solutions because we know full well there is almost no chance of getting the honest and necessary practices adopted which would cure these ills. Public prejudices are too strong.”


Nothing much has changed since 1994. Pleasant pseudo-solutions to a wide variety of problems continue to be suggested or limply attempted with the meager results easily predicted beforehand.

But dear reader, there are in fact simple solutions to complex problems if society had the stomach and the sense to implement them. Legalizing hashish as Simon suggested would deprive gangsters of a large part of their income – which would probably be quickly recovered by theft, extortion, bank robbery and other illegal and lucrative pursuits. Criminals may be morally bankrupt, but they do tend to refuse to remain economically bankrupt for long.

Punishing harder with longer prison terms, too, seems to have no effect on idiots who accept prison sentences as a badge of honor. Instead, I suggest without any attempt at humor for humor’s sake, that young criminals caught twice at narco sales, weapons usage or any form of violence, be stripped naked and outfitted only in a baby’s diaper, a baby’s little pink hood put on his head, and a pacifier taped in his mouth, a rattle taped to his hand and he be placed in a play pen-like cage in the middle of the Townhall Square 12 hours a day for the period of one year for everyone to see and laugh at. This would be a sentence to scare the devilishness out of any motorcycle thug or Black Cobra. Public humiliation!

As for criminal violence.. has anyone ever looked at the average Rocker (Danish motorcycle gangsters) from a biological stand point? Why are they so massive? Surely their mothers and fathers weren’t all gorilla-shaped? Of course not. A massive abuse of steroids is the explanation. And as everyone knows by now, steroid abuse leads to an increase in violent behavior. A simple solution? Violent criminals testing positive for steroid use should be injected with massive doses of female hormones for at least a year. The estrogen may not totally curtail their aggressive outbursts but at least they’ll be more inclined to have a good cry about them afterwards.. which will lead to shame and the resulting lessening of anti-social behavior.

What about car thieves who seem to be better at stealing cars than at driving them, crashing most of them, it seems? Simple. Anyone caught stealing a car twice will have a sizable concrete block molded around his right foot making it impossible for him to drive a car. After he has to hump around with a 20 kilo block for a year or so he’ll soon turn to some other less deadly outlet for his idiocy.

Simple solutions for the punishment of crime were also tried in England two hundred years ago. While some prisoners were forced to sew burlap mail bags if they wanted to earn their dinner, others were employed in another clever way. Some prisoners were kept in their cells with a heavy wooden box with a crank. If the prisoner wanted to receive breakfast, he had to turn the crank 10,000 times. 15,000 times for lunch and another 20,000 for dinner. The gears in the box could be adjusted by the prison guards to make it harder or easier to turn, according to the health and strength of the prisoner. Turning the crank gave the prisoners something to do but had no other positive side-effect.

I propose that prisoners be given an exercise bicycle in their cells. By pedaling the bikes – 20 kilometers for breakfast – another 20 for lunch – a further 20 for dinner, the prisoner’s health would be improved and the bikes could generate the electricity needs for the prison - and any excess electricity produced could be sold to energy companies. The same sensible system ought to be used in most homes. If pudgy lazy little Emil wants to watch crap TV programs and/or play monstrous and brainless computer games most of his free time, let him provide the electricity for the devilish machines by pedaling a bike hooked up to them for 3 or 4 hours a day. Let him burn calories and help the nation fight Co2 production!

What about the horrors and the ugliness of street prostitution? While there is no real reason to punish women who rent out their bodies from the safety and the comfort of their own homes or message parlors – nor should their customers be hounded – there are practical reasons for working to eliminate the ugly and soulless practice of street prostitution. What about a combination of Alcatraz and Legoland for these poor working girls? Flakfortet is the answer. (Note: Flakfort is a former navel base on and island not far from Copenhagen.)

Flakfortet is honeycombed with many chambers which could easy serve as both workplaces and residences for any girl wishing to work there. Foreign and home-born prostitutes caught working the streets would be given the choice of employment in Flakfortet or being expelled from the country (..jail time for the Danish ones.)

The girls transported to the island would be checked for sexually transmitted diseases and drug possession on their arrival, and checked again before being allowed to leave. A portion of their earnings would be used for their room and board and other expenses incurred while on “Fantasy Island.” And by keeping them off the Danish streets I wouldn’t have to keep saying, “No, no thank you, ma’am. I’ve just had a good wank,” to all the Eastern European street walkers who offer me their services when I’m trying to visit family on Viktoria Street.

As for endless wars and crime? How can we get males to behave less violently and aggressively? First turn on your TV and observe. What do you see?

Crocodiles. Crocodiles and sharks. Tune in to Animal Planet, Discovery or National Geographic and you’re likely to see viewers being tantalized and frightened again and again by these toothy carnivores in the hope of boosting ratings. On every other channel, however, you’ll see murderous humans entertaining us, whether it’s TV2 or CNN.
Anyone in possession of a television knows perfectly well that human beings are the most dangerous animals on the planet. Yet still we shrug off how destructive we are. As if it is but a trifling detail. But if crocodiles or sharks posed the imminent threat to the planet that we sapiens do we’d all quickly ban together and no matter the cost we’d exterminate them. But they aren’t. They have lived in pact with nature for hundreds of millions of years without upsetting the apple cart. Malarial mosquitoes are no danger to the world. Nor are small pox and tuberculosis. HIV and Ebola aren’t a threat to this planet, either. But we are. And we will do nothing effective to change our ways until, like mould on an orange, we consume everything and become extinct along with all other life. We are the terminal species – the species that out-smarted itself.
Doubt that? Ask yourself why have we never been visited by aliens? Perhaps the simple answer is that by the time a species becomes intelligent enough for inter-stellar travel, it has already reached the stages of over-population and over-consumption and the resulting terminal fratricide. Smart aliens don’t come here because smart aliens already killed themselves before their spaceship was perfected.
But what if we humans managed to perfect such a spaceship? The idea that it is our hope and our fate to move on to other worlds, abandoning this raped and barren smoking shell, only to do the same thing countless times through the coming eons is no consolation. If the simple four-legged creatures on some faraway virgin planet could look up at our landing space craft and give voice to a prescient thought, it might well be, “Oh shit! Here comes the consumers!”
Those of us who shudder at the thought of our descendents moving through the galaxies like mould on new oranges, would prefer to reengineer our species here first before we begin terraforming and colonizing new worlds. We literally need to get our feces together if we hope to avoid becoming the ultimate space pestilence.
Solutions. Solutions are what we need. And we will be offered solutions. Countless harmless palatable solutions with no hope of any measurable effect. Why? Because our politicians resemble us in our cowardice and in our puerile preferences. Pretend pseudo-solutions, as the famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee once said of rocking chairs and prayer, “Won’t get you anywhere.. but they’ll give you something to do.”
But Dear God, what would truly effective solutions look like, the dazed and skeptical reader may well ask.
First of all, as a logical and just initial step, the ratio of men to women must be drastically reduced. While men in Asia are already outnumbering women by hundreds of millions due to illogical and prejudicial abortions - and the trend seems to be accelerating - what is needed on a planetary level is the exact reverse. As anyone with half a brain knows, 98% of wars, crime, conflict and generally nastiness are created, promoted and – yes, enjoyed – by men. Men are the greatest and most long-lasting problem this planet faces. Yet if the reader can see and admit this, why does the reader shy away from wanting real remedy?
Women of the world, take the first logical step. If your first fetus is determined to be male, abort it. If you absolutely have to have a third child, you can perhaps allow that one to be male. Women consume less, care for others more and more effectively, produce more positive contributions to society, so logically the more of them and the less of us hormonally deranged men the better. Let us have at least two or three hundred years of female leadership and dominance, for after all, three hundred years is a paltry sliver of time. We will certainly need that sliver to right the many wrongs hurtling down upon us due to detrimental male dominance.
We will also need to re-engineer our bodies. As women - and increasingly many man - already engage in perpetual dieting, we ought to, through genetics, go even farther and reduce our size to a third or a fourth. Pygmies should be our ideal. (Imagine feeding a family of four on a chicken leg.)

One quick step on this road is gastric bypass surgery. A recent segment on 60 Minutes showed that people undergoing gastric bypass surgery not only quickly lose dangerous weight, they’ve also been instantly and completely cured of diabetes and had their risk of heart disease magically limited. Not only are these people consuming less food to the betterment of the planet, but their health has been vastly improved, also to the greater benefit of our hospital expenditures. They also consume less clothing and as they weigh less, less fuel is needed to cart them around.

Ultimately, what may save us as a species is not that we spread out into the galaxies like mould, but the exact opposite. That we become trees. That we put down roots. That we live our whole lives in one place, using no oil or hydrogen to move us from place to place, that our travel and commerce will be done electronically, our sensations, sexuality and our communications shared and multiplied through a coming super-internet interconnectability. Perhaps science, having already introduced jellyfish genes into pigs to make them glow in the dark(!) can insert chlorophyll genes into us, so that we receive our nourishment, or the greater part of it, directly from the sun? Green hair is a small price to pay for survival. And what is nobler than a tree?
Plant your feet. It’s time to turn over a new leaf.

(But if you insist on retaining your legs and remaining mobile, when and if you do land on a new planet, shake hands with the first tree you meet. It will likely be the planet’s smartest inhabitant.)

There you have them, dear reader. Real solutions to real problems. But you will no doubt will continue to prefer pleasanter ones that don’t work.

The Brutish Right Will Save The Planet

..unfortunately (fortunately?) they will not save many people. And for that we should be grateful.

Horrified already? If so, get ready for a wild ride, as the premise of this little exercise is to show why the heartless, greedy, vicious, Right Wing politicians of the world and their followers will ultimately save the planet.

Hang on to your hats, dear readers!

Let’s start with a little anecdote from back in the 1980’s.

A Danish tax lawyer named Mogens Glistrup appeared on TV here in the early 1980’s, bragging that he paid zero income taxes – because he knew how to legally play the system. A furor erupted, most condemning him, but a sizeable part of the population, business people and the more know-nothing disgruntled part of the working class, let themselves be suckered into supporting his newly-founded Progress Party... and his party grew from nothing to take a fourth of the seats in Parliament almost overnight.

At one point he famously said, to cut taxes he would do away with the Danish military and just have a recording the Russians could call which would announce “We surrender.” Of course everyone here knew that Denmark would last 5 minutes if the Russians ever wanted to invade and that the military was an expensive cosmetic device useful only to protect Danish pride – but most people hated to be reminded of it.

Later Mr. Glistrup said something which made my blood run cold. He said, at a time when Danes were generously collecting funds to aid millions of starving people in Biafra, “This is stupid. If we save 2 million from starving today when we can, there will be 10 million starving in ten years and we won’t be able to save them. So isn’t it better to do nothing now?”

It is this cold heartless logic of the Right that may save the planet and at least some of its people.

But save it from what? And how?

The cold, heartless, selfish Right will save the planet from science and progress, from cooperation, from all the things that will make 20 billion people starve and try to cut each other’s throat in a frenzied effort to survive in 20 or 30 years’ time.

For what does science and progress accomplish? They save more and more babies from dying, dying from malaria, smallpox, polio, measles, cholera. And science will save many more from dying in the future from diabetes, breast and prostate cancer, high blood pressure. Science will find ways to fight more and more diseases, grow more and more food, provide more and more energy.. until we reach the critical numbers that can’t be sustained for all of science’s noble efforts. Right now science and progress are providing millions of now-middleclass Indians with cars, and the Chinese are soon going to be chugging along in the Hummers they’ll be constructing. The only way human growth and consumption will halt is if something halts it. Famine. Draught. Plague. War.

Now, some will argue that as education and prosperity become more widespread and the norm, birthrates will plummet. Perhaps the world’s population will level off at 10 billion. Well, perhaps so, but in order to keep the 10 billion alive and comfortable, science and smart politicians will have to keep the system super effective and provide a constant supply of food, water and energy. Temporary breakdowns would be catastrophic. And key resources like oil, nitrates and other vital minerals and chemicals will still disappear at some point.

The only thing that can save the planet from global warming, a destruction of most animal and fish species, a horrendous depletion of forests and natural resources, and devastating pollution, is a drastic fall in the numbers of people on the planet – from 8 or 10 billion to perhaps 500 million.

And who is better prepared to aid in this population drop than the Right? Of course they won’t help intentionally or out of any altruism. And as most Right Wingers claim to be against birth control, their efforts in this area won’t be conscious. But it will be effective, none the less.

For the following reasons:

Right Wingers hate science.. except for military science. They’re against stem cell research and the theory of evolution, as many of their most vocal members are religious nuts. This goes for Right Wingers in Palm Springs as well as Pakistan. Right Wingers won’t believe in Global Warming as they continue to believe there’s more money to be made from oil or nuclear power, so screw the environment. They actively promote the myth that global warming is a myth. They relish in meat eating, the bigger and the bloodier the steak the better, and they ridicule vegetarians for being pale wimps. The notion that billions of methane-producing pigs and cattle might be greatly harming the planet is of no concern to them, for they will only light up the barbecue and howl with carnivorous delight. And because of their contempt for the environment they will bring chaos and destruction closer – and populations will drop much sooner.

Right Wingers also promote division and xenophobia, the idea that the guy across the border is dangerous, different, inferior, a rival, smash him before he smashes you. His skin color, his religion, even the things he eats, are different and therefore disgusting. “Everybody but us is the enemy.” This eternal hostility and hatred of the foreign, will greatly aid in the creation of wars and conflicts and in the following population drops.

Logic would tell us that, as far as over-population goes, the more people engaging in homosexual behavior the better, as long as they use condoms and have access to AIDS medicine.. (..for pregnancies rarely occur due to homosexual behavior.. or am I wrong about this?) The Right, in their hatred for all things gay or even logically sexual, whether these Right Wingers reside in the Vatican or Pakistan, will always actively fight abortion, birth control, condoms, anything that would help prevent unwanted pregnancies, disease or general misery.

And the more disease-ridden and poverty-stricken children that are born the faster the Apocalypse will arrive.

The Right Wing has always been not only a death cult but a suicide cult, longing for purging fire and self-immolation – which partially explains why they so favor oil and everything combustible and have such contempt for windmills. The Hitlers, Mussolinis, Limbaughs of history relish risky behavior and seducing others to become puppets and bit-players in their own private Ragnaroks. The Alpha-beasts will always have mindless followers, admirers and inheritors.

And perhaps like the Hindu gods of destruction, the planet will need them when it begins to succumb to the successes of science and the eventual resultant unsustainable growth?

As Mr. Glistrup might have said, “Is it better for 20 billion to die instead of 10 billion before we slide back into 1,000 years of darkness and misery?”

Competitors & Co-operators

I think I've figured it out… somewhat.

I previously said people are divided into basically four groups:

The Organizers

– planners, builders, investors, generals

The Organized – soldiers, drones, workers, taxpayers

The Disorganizers – anarchists, rebels, the envious, the malicious

The Disorganized – the lazy, the dimwitted, the dispirited, the oblivious

..and I said at the time none of us resides solely and only in one group. At different moments of our lives we reside in two or more groups at the same time.

Now I have decided that we also fall into two different groups who might well replace the idea of Conservative and Liberal, or Republican and Democrat.

The Competitors & The Co-operators

Competitors believe that competition and self-interest are the best motivators for progress and prosperity.

Co-operators believe that you can get just as far if not farther by co-operation.

Competitors love sports, soldiers, wars, flags, uniforms, bold moves, no regrets, go-team-go and screw the opposition. The Competitors are only interested in providing spoils, victory, prosperity, happiness for their own teams and tribes. Often times they enjoy and mock the backwardness and misery of others.

Co-operators love meetings and voting and voting whether to have a vote. It’s said the camel looks as if it was designed by a committee of co-operators – while the Hummer looks as if it was designed by a competitor from the Herman Goring School of Aesthetics.

Competitors feel that life is about Us against Them… or more correctly Me against Everyone Else.

Co-operators, too, may fear that life is about Me against Everyone Else.. but believe the best and perhaps the only way to survive merciless competition is by careful and thoughtful co-operating with those many others who also hate the cold and corrosive effects of self interest gone wild. Co-operators nourish and cherish. Competitors bulldoze, plunder and ravage, build steel mills and power plants.

Obviously we need both kinds of people, both attitudes, at different times and for different circumstances. But for either side to triumph totally would have great drawbacks.

The Co-operators may often be slow, ineffectual, timid.. but a world inhabited or operated solely by them would be a much more pleasant place in which to reside than the dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest triumphing bull male battleground that a pure Competitors’ society would be.

Some might say the Competitors’ world is by nature a male one, while the Co-operators’ is a female one.

Fine by me.

Let women rule the world for a while. It might take the ladies quite a bit longer to drill for oil on National Park grounds or build Nuclear reactors if it indeed proves necessary – but at least we’ll be spared the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Venezuela’s Chavez, Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Silvio Berlusconi, Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh – and all the other manipulating Mussolini-clone Competitors who are having so much fun exercising their egos.

As the Africans say, “When elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled.”

Lastly, Competitors are exclusive – Co-operators are inclusive.

Competitors love secret societies, country clubs, gated communities, anything that assembles an elite. They eat in exclusive restaurants. They buy exclusive luxury goods. They hate anything from the outside, anything foreign or different – unless it is expensive. They want monoculture and lock step thought. The jack boot is the sound they dance to. The military band.

(A glowing example of their monomania and exclusive Us against Them is the high incidence of birth defects among Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Polygamous Mormons, and isolated pockets of Moslems residing in plural societies. They fear and reject foreign ideas and foreign sperm! Inbreeding results.)

Co-operators, on the other hand, are inclusive, inviting. They welcome the foreign, the spicy, the exotic, the different, new ideas, new philosophies, new impulses, new religions, other skin colors. The opinions of those who have no money or power but having warm feelings and ideas. The music of the Co-operators is the music of the third world, jazz, reggae, blues.

Co-operators want everyone to be happy, as the more the merrier.

Competitors want their side to win and thrive and the other side to lose.. and they still love to make sissies cry.

(..yes… I was always picked last in dodgeball games..)

Warning! This Could Be the Most Depressing Thing You’ve Ever Read

Readers with suicidal tendencies kept in check by powerful medication may want to stop here. Your meds may not protect you.

Undeterred none-the-less? All right, let us gently proceed.

Mark Twain, in his boundless wisdom, pointed out, “I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me the slightest.”

But before we proceed to discuss what happened before we were born, let’s draw an unavoidably gruesome picture of what will happen to us after we are dead, for that is what seems to worry a sizeable percentage of the population who wish to live forever but don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday.

Let me give it to you straight. After we are dead for a hundred million billion trillion years, we’ll hardly have begun being dead. If you multiply that hundred million billion trillion by a hundred million billion trillion – and keep multiplying it every second for another hundred million billion trillion years – you won’t even reach one percent of the time you will remain dead. For forever is a really long time, indivisible and irreversible. Eternity is one endless wait in God’s Laundromat. It is also a dull and pointless subject from which we can derive neither wisdom nor solace.

So let us return to the time before you were born.

Some time around 3 billion years ago, Mother Nature (with or without God’s help) concocted a soup of nutrients, perhaps aided by lightning, which began to percolate. Molecules bumped into each other, connected and divided and reconnected, again and again until after eons of time random connections remained viable and the spark of life sputtered into being. Molecule connections pulsed and throbbed and generation after generation new connections grew, evolving until units of life began to split in two and simple replication was achieved.

Let us focus on just one of those primal cells. It divided as its ancestors had, and its offspring divided, down to the thousands of millions of generations. Each cell in this chain successfully divided at least once before it was eaten by others or died a natural death. And each succeeding cell did the same. It reproduced before it died. After a million million generations fins and feet were achieved, and crawly things invaded the land to reproduce, generation after generation. Some lines developed wings or horns or poisonous fangs. Some climbed trees in search of fruit. One line developed an opposable thumb. This line could make and hold tools. Fire was tamed and thousands of generations were spent beside bonfires, chipping flint spear points and knives. One line managed to find enough food and to avoid the deadly assaults of rivals and wild animals, surviving infancy and successfully reproducing at least once, each generation managing to produce offspring in spite of hunger, disease, and death during child birth.

Again and again and again in this one line, every link in the chain was somehow miraculously able to provide the next link in the chain, adding a new generation. Some links were noble caring parents and good citizens, some links were rogues and robbers and murders. Many many were rapists, for there was no romance nor marriage a million years ago. Some were prostitutes, male and female. Some were wise, some were kind, some were lazy, some were a pestilence to their communities. But each and every link in this chain were lucky and somehow managed to reproduce the next generation, continuing the unbroken chain, despite floods, famine, plague, slavery, persecution, civil wars or simple competition. Again and again strength and endurance combined with sheer luck, and each link in the chain survived long enough to reproduce itself. Again and again and again and again. Until after 3 billion long years you were born.

You (and your offspring if you have them) are the end product of a three billion year long chain. Not once in three billion years was the chain broken before successful reproduction or you wouldn’t be here. Despite the fact.. and probably because of the fact.. that hundreds if not thousands of your ancestors were murders and rapists and prostitutes in order to survive, you are privileged to be alive today. Rejoice! Each of us who is alive today is alive because we are the products of countless rapes, murders and land-grabs!

But are you grateful.. or as grateful as you ought to be?

So try to show a little class, and a little gratitude for the struggles of the countless generations before you. You may not have been born for a specific purpose. But you were certainly born because a billion ancestors strove to give you the chance not to be a total fuck up.

Sympathy For The Devils

We are often reminded that with an honest understanding of others comes some sympathy and perhaps some small degree of respect.

Good God, I would like to think so.

But some attempts at empathy are fruitless. Others are not fruitless but merely thankless, the rewards being far too meager in comparison with the efforts made to build bridges. An example of a possibly thankless endeavor? Trying to understand the Right, the Conservatives, Republicans, Reactionaries, Neocons, whatever you prefer to call them.

But why try to understand them? To what end? How could we possibly profit from a better understanding of this wild and boisterously complex tribe?

Well, two reasons for making the effort immediately spring to mind. Firstly, the subject of the Right is a fascinating one, historically, psychologically, economically.. and biologically? And a better understanding of the worse excesses of the Right may help us creampuffs to better withstand their eternal attempts to mold the world in their puffed up image.

To begin (..and forgive me for this..) let’s start with a quick sociological history of the United States. America, to a large degree was founded by puritan religious fanatics fleeing deserved persecution in Europe, their greatest wish being to impose their harsh and totalitarian views on others and burn more witches in the New World. Our founding fathers, some two hundred years later, sick of religious squabbling and sobered, attempted to establish a union based on other more humane principals than divine revelation and retribution.

The early years of the United States were marked by a competition of fundamentally different ideas as espoused by Jefferson and Hamilton. Jefferson hated cities, money, political parties - while Hamilton pointed out you couldn’t run a country without banks, stable currency and a bureaucratic infrastructure. That the nation was soon further divided between an industrializing cheap-immigrant-labor-dependent North and an agricultural slave-based Southern economy, further split the country.

The Republican Party, partially founded by Lincoln, had as one of its pillars, the abolition of slavery. Lincoln was their first presidential candidate, but after Lincoln’s murder, the party quickly went astray, bought and corrupted by men made rich during the Civil War. From the 1870’s on the party became a coalition of rapacious big railroad, steel and oil interests in the east, smaller businesses in the Midwest, but pretty much non-existence in the South. Thirty years later Teddy Roosevelt made a valiant attempt to reform the Republicans, to fight brutal monopolies and trusts, to bring pure food and drugs laws, to establish national parks, and he accomplished much but failed at even more. Meanwhile the Democrat Party strength was with whites in the south who were working to keep the now-freed blacks from rising above their station – as well as with recent immigrants in the north-east who were struggling to organize unions.

Thirty more years would go by and Teddy’s distant cousin, Franklin, finally triumphed over the Republicans battered by the Depression. His Democratic party was revitalized by his building of a coalition of urban and rural workers, the unemployed, the poor, immigrants and minorities. His establishment of public work projects to give employment such as the W.P.A. helped get America back on its feet. For the next thirty years the Democrats further changed and strengthened America, with the establishment of Social Security, Medicare and the Federal enforcement of the end to segregation and black voter prevention in the South. Truman, Kennedy and Johnson further worked to purge racism from the Democratic Party.

The Right was out in the cold from 1933 to 1968 when Richard Nixon’s brilliantly cynical tactic, the so-called Southern Strategy, split the votes of the rural poor in the south, appealing as it did to white racists and die-hard segregationists as well as fundamentalist Christians. Thus strengthened, the Right in America was able to gain and hold power for much of the next 40 years.

America is a special country. While in most other industrialized and semi-industrialized countries, the poor and the working class are left-wing, supporting unions and leftists parties and policies. In America, the working class – at least in rural areas – is proudly right-wing. Why? Perhaps the tantalizing hope of the American Dream – You, too may some day be rich – propels the dreaming rural white poor into fearing taxation and government interference? “I may win the lottery some day and I don’t want the government to take it all to pay for my unemployment and health benefits today.” Such is the logic of the poor whites of the Red States. Naïve? Short-sighted… or very long-sighted?

The Right’s comtempt for Washington and politicians in general is easily explained. When you so often and so easily and so cheaply buy and corrupt politicians why should you respect them? Reason enough for the Right to proclaim its distrust of government (..but only when it is out of power.) The Right’s mantra is a scornful mocking of anything to do with Washington except for the military, the intelligence services, the prison system, or local or national police forces. You will never hear the Right criticize these institutions, except for occasional accusations that they may be showing a tendency towards namby pamby leniency when liberals are in office and at the helm. No, the Right is generally all about the gleeful and unashamed show of force. For them the Pentagon is a paragon and prisons are better expenditures than schools, and soldiers and cops better role models than teachers. Uniforms, whether they be football, SWAT team or Green Baret are symbols of unabashed masculine assertiveness.

Why? Why the love of power symbols?

The powerless rural whites have always and will always long for power, long for the symbols of power, toughness and invulnerability. Guns, gas-guzzling muscle cars. The N.R.A. and NASCAR have replaced the KKK. “We don’t whine – we brag, we shoot!”

Now, to be fair, some rural people do need to supplement their diets by hunting. And when you find your home being burgled repeatedly by meth-crazed predators and the nearest police station is 60 miles away, you, too may want to hide a 12 gauge under your bed.

And you may gladly and gratefully vote for Senators and Governors bought and paid for by mining and mineral interests, as these companies are often the sole employers for a hundred miles. In Rock Springs, Wyoming, my home town, the biggest employer and the only one paying a decent wage is Haliburton. No wonder the Right holds power in the rural states. They are often the only ones who actively ignore environmental and health laws in order to dig up the minerals and thus provide jobs. To tell the blue collar workers of the Red States they don’t know which side of their bread is buttered insults and does not convince them.

The master manipulators of the Right play the rural poor as if they are playing an organ. Emotionalism is the framework, combining blind high school football rah rah my-country-right-or-wrong patriotism, primitive religiosity, racism, fear, envy, anger, resentment. Into the awful blend is the incessant mocking of the weak, women, gays, minorities, in order to feel more manly, powerful and safe.

That there is also emotionalism on the Left is also true – and also something that evidences itself in primitive outbursts and frozen prejudices. But as the Leftist loyalists noted forlornly after losing to the Right-wing Franco in the Spanish Civil War, “They may have won but we had the best songs.”

There is more in this sad aside than otherwise might be realized. The proof that the Right is a twisted and stunted thing, a force for no good, is evidenced by the glaring fact that there is no such thing as great Right Wing music, art, literature, humor.. or anything celebrating humanity. The Left may stumble and occasionally do evil things, but the motivation comes from a good place, the desire for universal kindness, sharing and freedom. But when the Right does good, an exceedingly rare occurrence, it is usually for the wrong reasons and immediately regretted by them. “Do good? We don’t want to start looking like pussies now!”

Fear is a motivator and a unifier for the Right, just as it is for the Left. But while the Left fears environmental disaster, poverty, overpopulation, depleted resources, racism, sexism, xenophobia, war – the Right laughs at them. Instead the Right fears emasculation, taxes, bureaucracy, big (non-military) government, foreigners, and as H.L. Mencken once said of the Puritans, “They harbor the fear that someone somewhere may be happy..” if that someone is not of their own gated community.

The racism and xenophobia of the Right is a multifaceted thing. For example although the Right may fear blacks who are also poor, one can see an odd phenomenon in action. An African dictator, black as coal, who has robbed his nation blind, may well be welcomed with open arms by rich white racists in Palm Springs – for he is a thundering success, a self-made man.. and even better… he succeeded by massive cheating. A man to be truly admired!

For an honest understanding of the Right it helps to recognize the legitimacy of their fears, exaggerated or not. Right wing death squads throughout Latin America exist for a reason, the real fear and possibility that the landless poor will overwhelm the rich property owners, seize their lands and murder them in their beds – something Robert Mugabe has urged his poor black followers to do to the white ranchers of Zimbabwe. That the property-owning Right fears the poor is natural and understandable. But that they also despise the poor is less so. Perhaps in order not to weaken, to show sympathy, it’s necessary for the Right to also mock and scorn the poor. Sympathy is weakness – and weakness is a cardinal sin on the Right.

In many ways the followers of the Right are a more honest group, motivated by the most basic primative instincts. To fear the foreign, the different, is the same instinct that prevents us from putting unknown substances in our mouths. We distrust to survive. But to move on, to progress, takes exploration and an honest measurement of results. The Right fears change because they cannot control and rule it beforehand. Instead they seek only to consolidate their own gains.

Those on the Left who believe in kindness, sharing, progress, and envision a better future for mankind, operate out of hope. Those on the Right have no naïve optimism. They see all too much evidence (in themselves) that people are self-serving, treacherous and need to be herded and ruled with an iron hand. Alpha males must win and decide for the greater good of the herd. Sympathy is equated with vulnerability. Efforts to protect the environment, to improve health care, to ensure the basic human rights of minorities, women and homosexuals are all regarded as “Evil Liberal attempts to destroy America.”

Having recognized all this what can us so-called Progressives do to try to diminish the numbers of souls foolish enough to fall into the hands of the Right?

Very little, I imagine, as the rural poor white population need jobs, educational opportunities – and something other than the meager choice between the church, the saloon and the high school football game as gathering and unifying places.

The same with the black population of inner-city ghettos. As long as there are no jobs and the only gathering places are churches, bars and crack houses, poverty and crime will continue to rule.

But the sad fact is, when the Right looks at black ghetto life and the high proportion of crime, it smiles, confirmed in its belief that it is somehow more moral, clever, destined to rule, that blacks and other minorities are designed by the hand of a white God to be inferior.

And when we Lefties look at the worst excesses of the poor rural whites, the KKK supporters, the gun nuts, the snake handlers and the xenophobes, we are smugly confirmed in our beliefs that these are inferior souls, to be rightly despised and dismissed.

Until we can instead do something to change the reality of poor rural whites, the Right will continue to use them as voter fodder, canon fodder and general dupes. And as long as the military will take anyone, the rural poor will continue to praise it.