BUSHIES DON'T CARE ABOUT HOME DEFENSE--EXCEPT AS AN EXCUSE.
The feds have completely ignored our desperate shortage of nurses already, even BEFORE upcoming bio-attacks. (Denver is already 1000 nurses short, with shortage of 4000 expected by 2005. We need emergency 'wartime' recruiting/training program, with salaries and work-conditions good enough to attract qualified candidates.)
Our rulers have also done little about the port-crisis of 20,000 huge containers coming in, largely uninspected, each day--each possibly containing a small nuke or a huge 'dirty bomb'. Los Angeles asked for 70 million to address this problem; they got 6 million. And so on with other obvious terrorist opportunities (e.g., missiles fired at airliners.)

Bush says the new Dept. of Homeland Security will make us safer..but then he and his Congress launched this radical reorganization without any special funding! Adding the present budgets of the Immigration Svc, the Coast-Guard and the other consitutuents of the new agency, we discover that for every $10 spent on the Pentagon--for bombers not very relevant to the problem of individual terrorists--only $1 is spent for work directly related to blocking terrorists.
It is understandable that we can't afford proper home defense--not while we're giving $1000 million per DAY to the Pentagon.
HOMELAND SECURITY AS AN EXCUSE:
We all understood after 9/11 that some curtailment of our traditional liberties would be necessary in this new, unnerving kind of crisis. But noone foresaw that the Pentagon would grab this chance to set up a national database including every relevant fact about every citizen.
Spokesmen made the point that corporations already had much of this data on hand; and it is true that with megatechnology interacting with our consumer greed, most of our privacy has simply disappeared. However, corporations can't use this data to arrest some of us (perhaps twisting the data to frame them), and thus to intimidate any other critics of government. Also, the data can be use to blackmail people and force them to become criminal agents of the government.
The Bush gang controls the Supreme Court already; they will shortly control all the federal courts. Who will stop this move to a Police State?
Is this data-swallowing simply an overreaction to the terrorism-crisis? Hardly, since this group, as we noted above, have shown an amazing lack of concern for home defense! Instead, while ignoring measures that might make us safer, the administration has grabbed this chance to undermine our constitution.
Suppose there is resistance? The Pentagon has developed a complete line of military robots that could suppress any rebels--including substitutes for foot-soldiers!-- needing the cooperation of very few treasonous military personnel.
We have always assumed that no U.S. soldiers would shoot at Americans; but U.S. robots will, without hesitation. (The handguns of '2d-amendment freedom defenders' will be laughably irrelevant.)
In medicine it is a common phenomenon that a germ may not be so harmful in itself; but it may trigger an autoimmune reaction in which the body destroys itself. So also our real danger may lie not from the terrorists but from the chance they gave to home-grown tyrants to prevail over us.

 

LETTER TO USATODAY A PARADOX
The significance of the Iraq inspections is the opposite of what people think.
If the inspectors report that Iraq has no real gas or biowar capacity,
then the Bush-team will decide Iraq is helpless, and will find some excuse to invade. (Richard
Perle, a top Bush advisor, has told the British that a clean bill of health from the
inspectors won't stop our invasion!/UKDAILYMIRROR,22N.)

But if it is decided that Iraq has 'dusty'VX gas (or aerosol germs) that can penetrate our
invading soldiers' space-suits, then our government, we trust, will at least postpone the
invasion.
So our semi-competent spies say Iraq is helpless, and we invade.
Now suppose Iraq is NOT helpless.....
On the other hand, why would a sane man say what Perle did? Americans will accept any U.S.
aggression if the target nation launches any sort of 'first strike'. Perhaps the Bush-team is
pressuring Iraq to strike first from desperation, feeling that with their weapons they must 'use
'em or lose 'em.' The ruthlessness of this possible Bushie move is understood if we remember that the provoked attack will be on Americans!

 
MEGATECHNOLOGY:
If you read ancient literature, and literature from different cultures today, you see that typical humans have always been childish, short-sighted, and often cruel. Young men in 'first-world' cultures today are probably less cruel than in other places, other times. Face-to-face, most of them would never attack a child, or even a dog.
But killing today doesn't usually take place face-to-face. Fine young Americans have breakfast in Kansas, then take off in their B-52s to bomb hell out of primitive countries on the other side of the world, blowing to bits dozens of women and children they can't even see--then back to Kansas for supper and a romp with their children.
It's so easy now to kill hundreds thoughtlessly, at little risk to yourself, not even needing the guts to look your victims in the face.
Who's ultimately responsible? Megatechnologists have destroyed humanity's main virtue:
our weakness.

 
OTHER LYONS ESSAYS (dating back to Jan '01)may be found at PVGREENS.ORG.
click on 'Join our Lists' / on next page, go down to line about 'archives/PVGREENS-DISCUSS/
Click on PVGREENS-DISCUSS / then, each month, on AUTHORS.

 
Letter to USATODAY WAR MEMORIALS
A perceptive cartoon (11 Nov) has a child asking if there will be a new memorial for those GI's killed in Iraq. Before that, I'd like to suggest a Monument of Infamy for the legislators who voted in 1967 for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Both Lyndon Johnson and Robert MacNamara admitted later they knew all along the war could never be won, as Daniel Ellsberg revealed in the Pentagon Papers in '67. The supposed attack on the destroyer Maddox was fake, and indeed George Ball admitted later that the Maddox was planted there hoping to provoke an attack to justify expanding the war.
Those legislators who approved that resolution were either criminally ignorant or criminally complicit in the fraud. Their misconduct caused most of the deaths noted on the present Vietnam memorial. Wayne Morse, as I remember, was the only Senator to oppose the infamous resolution. He should have a separate memorial honoring his brains and courage.
Some day, besides the memorial to the new war-dead, we may want a new Monument of Infamy for the current legislators who just voted to approve the Iraq invasion.

 
PRIDE: the lust for glory and the fear of humiliation.
Religions of the 'sons of Abraham' (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) say correctly that pride is the mother of wickedness and folly (to perceive the Judaeo/Christian horror at pride, see the movies AMADEUS--vs. spiritual pride--or THE CHOSEN--vs. worldly pride)--but the old pagans said, also correctly, that pride is the mother of achievement and the sense of honor. Once the necessities are achieved, pride is the main source of political motivation.
We had better study pride.
see STRUTTING AND FRETTING by Jann Benson & Dan Lyons.

 
HOLIDAY SPENDING:
Why do people overspend at Christmas? It may be from generosity. But it may also be explained this way: Many people love to shop and spend for its own sake. Christmas (like weddings) gives them a chance to shop and spend 'for others', without feeling selfish. Then comes the February hangover, when the credit cards must be paid.
Let's take Christ out of Christmas, for Christ's sake. Let Buddha take all the crap, for a change.

 
WILE E. COYOTE BLUSTERS;
MANY ROAD-RUNNERS RESPOND:
SECOND-STRIKE DETERRENTS VS. EVIL AMERICAN EMPIRE

The incredible September '02 document ['National Security Strategy of U.S.A']from the Bush-team made official and explicit what has long been the actual planned strategy of Washington hawks: to launch a first-strike against any nation that even TRIES to catch up with us
in weapons.

Such a strategy could never be seen as needed for our defense.
We already have thousands of H-bombs and missiles to serve as a praeternatural 2d-strike deterrrent against any nation that might want to attack us. (We have almost no deterrent or defense against the individual terrorists who constitute our real danger--but the Empire would be equally defenseless against this threat .)
No, the only purpose such a strategy could have would be as part of a grandiose imperialist program to dominate the world. We propose to block any other nation's attempt to develop a 2d-strike deterrent against us; then we can threaten any nation with impunity, with our
stupendous first-strike forces, and thus we can control the world.

The only hitch with this scheme is that many other nations already have nukes. Russia, especially, with thousands of nukes and intercontinental missiles, is quite immune to our first-strike threats.
The document seems to be aimed at China; indeed, I heard a Bushie-hawk on TV--smirking, he said, "We're going to save China from wasting money on armaments." Wanna bet?
China now has nukes, but few ICBMS. Also, our 'missile-defense' system is about to be funded extravagantly, so China probably won't waste time on producing ICBMs, but will pursue other delivery-methods.
France has nukes; so does Britain; so do Israel and India and North Korea and Pakistan (!)The question is, could these nations deliver their nukes to America, warning us in advance that any first-strike at them will result in unacceptable damage to America?
I would expect a country like China to sneak some small nukes into our homeland NOW, before we organize our 'home security' program, while we are obsessed with Iraq--to hide the nukes here, then warn us about this, to set up a 2d-strike deterrent. Who would set them off? Among the millions of Chinese in America, some would volunteer to join in a 2d-strike move to protect China. (At least China could claim this is so, and we couldn't be sure it isn't so.) Muslim crazies might also volunteer.

(I'm assuming--but without much real confidence--that our rulers are half-sane, sane enough not to be willing to sacrifice several American cities to their imperial fantasies.)

There are other delivery-systems besides ICBMs possible for small nukes (e.g., in some of the thousands of uninspected containers coming each day to our ports, putting our coastal megalopolises at risk)..
Muslim crazies, eager to die while killing Americans, could be used to deliver supergerms to our homeland, resistant to our vaccines/antibiotics. (To serve as a 2d-strike deterrent, these capabilities would have to known to U.S. rulers.) It's fascinating to hear from the CIA that FRANCE has stores of smallpox germs! What possible use could the French have for these germs, except as a desperate 2d-strike threat against America? (That would mean they don't rely just on their nuclear
threats.)

During the cold war, U.S. madly promised that if Soviets invaded Europe, we would suicidally launch a first-strike at Russia. Assuming that Soviet WANTED to invade Europe (which was never clear--
why would they want this?) this promise seems to have worked as a 2d-strike deterrent. A French-German alliance today could resist our empire, if Germany trusted France enough to count on their 'nuclear' umbrella--or if France helped Germany get nukes.
A French/German/British/Russian/Chinese alliance would be overwhelmingly stronger--though unlikely--and could provide a nuclear umbrella for other nations to defy us. (Though Tony Blair is our pet poodle, half of Britons, even after much propaganda, still oppose this war!)

The Pakistanis apparently helped North Korea to develop nukes. This made sense, to enlarge 2d-strike deterrent power vs. America. France and China could now help propagate 2d-strike nuke-power to other nations, to increase the number of nations immune to U.S. imperial threats. (This would work better against Empire than a promise to protect non-nuclear countries from our threats. After Britain double-crossed Czechoslovakia, why should countries trust other countries to defend them?) We may be driving the world to more nuclear proliferation!

The general point is this: from the time of Thucidydes, it has been clear that when one power asserts imperial ambitions, it pays the others to join together to block this power. (All the big nations of Europe joined to block Napoleon; all the allies joined to block Hitler.)
We have explicitly, with incredible bluntness, announced our imperial ambitions. We can expect other nations to unite against us.

We can also expect the common people throughout the world to unite against us. If people from many countries chose spontaneously to boycott our goods, WTO could do nothing, since its powers extend only against governments. (The worldwide Muslim boycott may have already damaged McDonald's Corporation.)
We might then boycott foreign goods--although it's not clear that resentment of foreign boycotts would overcome American greed, lusting for the most goods at the cheapest prices. Mutual boycotts would reverse globalization, setting up a 'beggar-thy-neighbor' situation, and lead to a second Great World Depression (which is already a threat, for other reasons.)

Once again, half-sane American rulers should give up their dreams of world empire, which we don't need anyway--such an empire serves only the ideological fanatics determined to impose 'free-market' dogmas on the whole world.

One is reminded of the time that Wile E.Coyote called upon Bugs
Bunny with a business-card that read, "I am bigger and stronger and faster than you ; please make things simple and surrender."
Bugs didn't surrender. Vietnam didn't. The nations of the world won't.

 
letter to NYTIMES SADDAM'S DILEMMA AND OURS.
Put yourself in Saddam's place. Bush controls the Supreme Court, the White House, the Pentagon, both Houses..who cares that most Americans now doubt the wisdom of invasion?
The UN has sold out; they're like the manager of the 'dancing' elephant who figures out how the elephant's feet are going to move, then plays the music to match. They pretend to authorize the invasion, knowing it would happen anyway, so they can pretend to be in charge.
Saddam is asked to admit inspectors who will certainly include spies to prepare for the invasion. He is asked to junk all his 'mass-destruction' weapons which are the only 2d-strike deterrent he has against invasion.
Saddam might decide to accept exile; let's hope he does. But instead, accepting his doom,
he might react violently and preemptively to this dilemma, if he doesn't care what happens to his people. He might admit the inspectors to stall for time, then wipe them out as his first move.
He could gas the Kurds for offering to cooperate with the Americans.
Israel is especially foolish to endorse the invasion; Saddam could provide their Palestinian enemy 'martyrs' with VX gas, which (killing through the skin) would expose the fraud of the gas-masks being issued to Israelis today. Their 'anti-scud' missiles would then be pretty irrelevant. He could mine his oil-fields with mines that spread VX gas. And of course he could provide the terrorists with supergerms to inflict on the American homeland.
Einstein is supposed to have said that in reality only 2 things are infinite: space and stupidity.

 
Wealthy Republicans are the smartest Americans;
the dumbest are the other Republicans.

Which explains why only 1 in 3 Democrats are crazy enough to support this invasion;
but 3 out of 4 of those 'other' Republicans back it.

 
Summary of arguments vs. invasion of Iraq:

IF WE DON'T INVADE: : [This part of the argument has an unreal quality. We are going to invade, come hell or high water, so we can never settle finally what would have happened if we hadn't invaded. But these points should still be made, to show that the invasion is wicked (because IT'S NOT NECESSARY for self-defense) and stupid (because the invasion itself unleashes terrible risks on us, unnecessarily.)

Saddam now could theoretically launch a 1st-strike at us (by germs he could share with terrorists for delivery against us), but he'd have to be crazy to do so (nothing to gain, everything to lose--destruction by our nukes).
He's evil, but he's not crazy. DURING 11 YRS. OF OUR BOMBING, HE HAS REACTED WITH IMPRESSIVE RESTRAINT.(This point is rarely noticed. People talk about the irresponsible things he did 20 years ago; but his behavior in the last decade should be decisive.)
So: there's absolutely no reason to think he would launch a 1st-strike at us. He is sensibly deterred by our awesome nuclear power. He does not pose an imminent threat to us, so we would be wicked and foolish (& violating international law) to launch a 'preemptive' first-strike at Iraq.

IF WE DO INVADE: & he thinks he's doomed, with nothing to lose, then he would gladly hand over his supgerms to the hundreds (or thousands) of terrorists eager to die while killing Americans. And he'll use awful VX gas against our invading GI's./ Again, we'd be foolishly self-destructive to invade Iraq.
Also, among one billion Muslims, rage at the bombing of Iraqi women and children will help recruit more terrorists to attack our homeland. Muslims in Indonesia and Kenya have risen against the West.
(Our Afghan campaign has already had an inflammatory effect.) The CIA gave testimony to Congress supporting these points.
-------------------------
"Ah, but Saddam does threaten his neighbors, so we must invade."
Answer: 1) Bush has no right to imperil our GIs--and our Homeland !-- to 'rescue' neigbors who can easily defend themselves. How many Americans want their GIs to die horribly while defending Israel?
We rescued the dicator in Kuwait earlier; now polls say that the Kuwaiti people hate us even more than do other Muslims! The government had to seal off a large part of their country to their own people, to protect our soldiers from Kuwaiti potshots.Still, now and then, some Americans get shot by Kuwaitis.


2) These neighboring countries DON'T WANT US TO INVADE! A meeting of mideast leaders in Cairo unanimously opposed the invasion. Their spokesman said it would 'open the gates of hell'. The Bush team pretends to know their interests better than they do themselves!

And what will happen after Saddam is removed? The Bush team pretend they can establish a sensible democracy there. "After all," they say, "We forced democracy on Germany & Japan after WWII.' However,
1) Iraq is an artificial collection of hostile tribes held together by fear of Saddam (as Yugoslavia was held together by Tito--after he died, chaos!) Turkey & Iran are watching greedily for their chance to move in and grab all that oil. Turkey has openly threatened invasion. Iran has 1.5 million Iraqi Shiites getting military training in Iran. Social chaos is likely after Saddam.
Our ' nation-builders' don't even speak the language!

2) Consider our nation-building success in Afghanistan: our puppet President Karzai needs American body-guards, can't trust his own people--and nearly got shot anyway! At most, Mr.Karzai is mayor of Kabul. The central govt. has little power outside that city.Opium production has skyrocketed since our invasion. Girls' schools are being mortared. Anarchy under warring lords is returning.It's true that kids can now fly kites there, and that people can now watch TV. Does this count as success? Women don't have to wear burkas any more (many still choose to do so), but their chance of being raped may be skyrocketing.
-------------------
Why have we no real allies in this enterprise? How many foreign ground troops will share with our GIs the dangers from VX gas,etc.? One would expect only token forces from Britain and Australia. The UN Security Council earlier expressed clearly their nearly universal judgment that the invasion was wrong, though they have now yielded under great U.S. pressure. Schroeder won a national election in Germany by running against Bush. A German official resigned after comparing Bush to Hitler, and a Canadian official resigned after saying that Bush is a moron.
Tony Blair says he'll help, and his tame Parliament approves the invasion conditionally --but half of Britons reject this war. Indeed 3 of 4 Americans reject going into this war without allies. The Pope and the American bishops have condemned this war, as well as all the religious leaders in Chicago.
It is bizarre to go to war with so little popular support at the beginning; what support there is will dissolve when the horrorible effects of VX gas,etc., on our invading GIs becomes apparent.
Is the whole world wrong, except the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Rice trio and their staffs? (Bush seems to be just a puppet.) Are they crazy? Or are they up to some deviltry they don't dare explain?

 
THE INTELLIGENT MINORITY IN A DEMOCRACY:
Suppose you lived under a real monarchy (the dumb king didn't just reign ceremonially--
he actually made the main decisions about national policy)..but it's a constitutional monarchy
( his powers are somewhat limited, and these limits are enforced by courts):
Usually, perhaps, you would not agree with the king's decisions--especially if he's an ignorant, self-confident lout. But you can usually live with these decisions--unless he decides foolishly to involve the country in a self-destructive war. (As for instance, when Napoleon and later Hitler decided to invade Russia!) In any case, you should feel no SHAME about dumb national policies, since you had no voice in deciding them, no more than did any resident foreigner--
who could also perhaps write critical letters to the editor.
Now and then the king will happen to agree with you; then you can back his policies with enthusiasm, but still knowing that they are not your decisions. (More commonly, you will decide to agree with the king; then you don't FEEL so helpless, though you are in reality no less powerless than when you disagree with him.)
If you have a large group of subjects agreeing with you, the king might heed your views somewhat. And you can form coalitions with other groups so that on some policies you can speak as one large group, and be somewhat heeded--though the last word will always be with the king--he can always choose to ignore any group of subjects.

Now suppose you're a stably-isolated MINORITY IN A DEMOCRACY--as were Catholics, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics a few decades ago. Once again, you usually have no real voice in determining national policies, any more than do resident foreigners--so you should feel no shame at their possible folly.
Now the SENSIBLE, INFORMED people in a democracy are practically always a stable minority; that is, most citizens are not very sensible or informed. (In America this is getting more vividly true every decade!) So the sensible people face the MAJORITY in the same way all subjects face their KING--often disagreeing with the chosen policies, but completely helpless to affect them.
Once again, several minority groups can sometimes form a coalition, and become the majority: during the Great Depression, under F.D.R., a Great Democratic Coalition was formed of white Southerners (bigots against blacks and Catholics and Jews) plus Jews and Catholics and blacks and intellectuals! But this only happens in a national emergency, like a Great Depression.
Jesse Jackson recently tried to form a 'rainbow' coalition of 'American loser-groups' (racial minorities, plus the poor, plus oppressed women)--but the poor and minority males resented uppity women, and the minority races resented each other. The coalition never coalesced.
Until the Viet war, 'upper-brow' suburban Americans often sided with the unions. But then the unions enthusiastically backed the war, which the 'upper-brows' saw involved incredible wickedness and folly. So the 'elite' quit backing the unions...this split was partly responsible for the quick demise of unions as an important political force.
Today there is a strong and stable coalition of foolish reactionary groups: white males resentful of uppity feminists, middle-class people who (like normal primates) fawn on the rich and despise 'losers', This coalition forms a small majority, but majority enough to carry practically all elections, especially since it is backed by Big Money.
So the minority of sensible, informed people is stably isolated, branded as 'liberal'.
We are in the position of subjects of a king.
Now and then, it happens that the king, the majority agrees with us sensibles.(For instance, two of three Americans say they oppose a 'no-ally' invasion of Iraq.) But this king is pretty dumb; A BARE MAJORITY STILL VOTES REPUBLICAN; now,after 5 Nov.'02, that party controls the White House, the Pentagon, and both Houses of Congress. So there is nothing the antiwar majority can do to stop the invasion.) All we minority-sensibles can do is to shout, "This is NOT in our name!", and then see that this decision is as foreign to us as one made by a ruler outside America--a decision which, however, may harm and destroy us (just as Europeans may feel that a Bush-team decision could end up harming or destroying them.)

A clear majority of Americans supported the Vietnam fiasco right up until it became super-obvious that this war could not be won. Then they turned for a time against the militarists--but not enough to cut the stupendous Pentagon budget! The American majority--
our King--is usually militarist; we have had umpteen wars since WWII, all the while calling ourselves a peace-loving people!
We sensible subjects can only hope that our nation can survive the childish, ignorant wickedness of our King. Of course we stay loyal to the system--because all the likely alternatives are clearly worse.

 
THE WORLD OF GLUT
Glut is when a society has an excess capacity for producing certain commodities, when we can produce more X than people are willing or able to buy. For instance, 5% of Americans can produce more food than we can sell here, or overseas; the surplus is given to the poor through food-stamps.
Glut in MOST commodities is inevitable, as an eventual result of high-tech innovations. Machines 'learn' to produce more and more product with less and less human input needed,
for lower and lower prices. If there is fairly unimpeded competition, then it may harm
all producers collectively to keep producing more, cheaper--but it benefits each producer
if he can undersell the others.

If they agree not to produce so much, then it pays each agent to cheat on the agreement.
However, within one country, the government can enforce such agreements--as when American farmers are paid not to plant crops, and the government sees to it that they don't.
And even between countries, such 'cartels' sometimes work. For instance, far more oil could now be produced world-wide than could ever be sold, at any profitable price. So OPEC countries agree not to sell over certain quotas. How is cheating prevented? by Saudi Arabia, which could produce oil for less than a dollar a barrel. If too much oil is produced, then S.A. threatens to flood the market and wipe out all its competitors. So far this system has worked; but new countries are now producing oil..so who knows?

GLOBALIZATION means that it can be cheaper to make a product on the other side of the world and ship it here, still selling it cheaper than local producers can manage. Countries like U.S.A., with very high labor costs, are the first to suffer from cheap foreign competitors--
who first use cheaper labor, with looser safety regulations, to undersell us.
They can also devalue their currency, so their goods are cheaper here and around the world. (Our dollar is now quite high, to the frustration of our producers.) But eventually all countries devalue their currency, and that competitive advantage is removed.
Finally, countries like Japan can produce goods with super-efficiency, produced mainly by robots--who need no cafeterias or health benefits, who can be 'trained' by the hundreds, not
one-by-one, and so on. (Trouble is, Japan is faced with runaway DEFLATION--more on this later.)

Trouble is, once most human workers are replaced by robots--robots don't buy or consume!
WHO WILL BUY ALL THIS STUFF MADE SO NIFTILY? True, the displaced humans will still need commodities, but that doesn't matter..only EFFECTIVE demand, DEMAND BACKED BY MONEY, counts in a world-market society. And our workers, like 3d-world poor people today, will have almost no money to buy stuff with, even at super-cheap prices.
Each country, traditionally, has imposed TARIFFS (taxes on foreign imported goods) to protect its own producers. But now FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS ban such tariffs. (Of course, when a country is cornered, it tends to cheat on the agreement. America recently imposed high tariffs on imported steel; but when other countries roared with rage--and threatened to respond by imposing tariffs on OUR exported goods-- the U.S. backed down considerably.)

When overcapacity happens, some actual overproduction happens temporarily. Then commodities get cheaper; but eventually, production is cut back--why make stuff that can't be sold at a profit?--and the few workers still employed get fired. The robots, practically alone, can produce far more than humans can/will buy.
When many products get more expensive all at once, this is a situation of INFLATION,which has traditionally been the main worry of government (partly because it harms rich lenders more than less-rich borrowers!) But now we may face DEFLATION, when many products get cheaper all at once. America already faces this situation: products that face world competition are dropping in price quite rapidly. (Computers have dropped 20% in price in a very short time!
Cars are 'sold' with loans involving zero interest.) Then it pays every smart consumer to wait and buy later, when things get still cheaper. That magnifies deflation dangerously.

I am a philosopher, not an economist; what is my interest in this problem? I'm interested in rational standards of PRESTIGE. [See STRUTTING AND FRETTING: STANDARDS FOR SELF-ESTEEM, by Jann Benson & Dan Lyons, available on interlibrary loan.]
Until now, productive people have had all the prestige coming from economic activities: inventors, hard-workers, investors. But now these worthies can be seen to be PART OF THE PROBLEM, not part of the solution.

Huxley's novel, BRAVE NEW WORLD, should be the bible of our day.
The true economic heroes should be the avid consumers who are too lazy or inept to compete in production...that is, those nonproductive people who still, somehow, have money to spend. Lazy people who inherit money are to be admired. And older pensioners, who do nothing productive, but consume by travelling, by needing drugs and medical attention, are very valuable.
It's really stupid to worry about the fact that the NUMBER OF WORKERS PER PENSIONER
is shrinking; that's very good.

Optimists about world population used to say sagely, "Every new consuming mouth that shows up is accompanied by a pair of productive hands." That's bad!

One bad fact about human psychology is that when the basic situation changes rapidly, our standards of 'splendid vs. pathetic' don't change anywhere near as fast, to endorse activities that are now socially beneficial. And these are the conduct-standards that count, not standards of guilt/innocence. People kill to get prestige-nowadays they kill just to get their names in the paper!-- and they commit murder or suicide rather than face the humiliation of seeming pathetic.
For instance, we still admire fighter-pilots, who are now quite obsolete. (In every war today, we first bomb hell out of enemy airstrips, so they can't send out any fighter-planes for ours to fight. Not only that, we now have pilotless planes run by people sitting at a desk miles away..these could be old ladies; old ladies, in fact, could manage most combat roles today..the actual combat-contact is through missiles and robots.) There is no place for Rambo in modern war, but movies still glorify Rambo types.

Similarly, you read and hear economic sages congratulating us regularly on our heightened PRODUCTIVITY, that is, on our ability to produce more product needing less human input.
We could economize (cut back) on different factors of production, for instance using less fuel per unit of product. But we never think of this: as we cut back on the humans needed for farming, we increased the fuel needed per unit--so some have said that our modern farms turn gasolene into corn.
Now of all the factors of production (land,capital,etc.) the one kind that is in enormous SURPLUS is HUMAN INPUT! We will shortly have 9 or 10 billion humans on earth, mostly unemployed. In such a situation, the person who improves ROBOTS should be scorned and hated. But we'll go on admiring such persons--not those admirable, non-productive consumers-- just as we admire successful criminals and useless basketball stars.

One basic cause of world glut is when too much of the world's money goes to the top 1%, who couldn't spend more than they do, even if they wanted to. Not enough money is in the hands of the poor, who would have no trouble finding important ways to spend it. The only preventative of this glut would be to somehow redistribute the world's wealth from the billionaires to the ordinary people. And that is not likely.

DEFLATION AND WORLD DEPRESSION, it seems, ARE COMING. How should I adjust? Skilled people who minister personally to the well-to-do (e.g., to pensioners) will still be employed, unless they can be replaced by robots--but there will be extra competition for these good jobs. However, a large number of feckless American youth are UNABLE to master
the rigorous training for, say, nursing, or mansion-management, or for Porsche repair, or for managing robots. So those who can get highly trained should do OK.

As more and more workers see they are or will be 'redundant', they may rebel as voters.
But by then the government may be able to control us all by force, using its nifty new war-robots.
American soldiers would never shoot Americans; American robots won't hesitate. And the handguns of the '2d-amendment defenders of liberty' will be laughably useless.

The sensible person,perhaps, will hold back on spending and investing; he will pile up his resources in cash (deposited in safe banks). After all, in the Great Depression, a whole hog could be bought for $1--and in Australia recently, a sheep sold for $1.

 
Truth is NOT the first casualty of war;
good sense perishes first; then there's no demand for truth.

 
A comment from a Korean-war combat veteran:
DON'T SAY WAR IS HELL..THAT SOUNDS TOO GLAMOUROUS. WAR IS SHIT.

 
MAIL-IN BALLOTS
I'm in favor of widespread use of mail-in ballots. This will abolish the secret ballot: someone can pay you to vote a certain way, then watch while you write in your vote and mail it.
But the end of the secret ballot would be a good thing.
As things are now, candidates pay hundreds of millions to TV moguls to post their silly ads, and calculate how much per vote the ads are costing. Why pay the middlemen? Since the voters are dumb enough to vote the way indicated by the most ads, the worst ads--why not have the money go directly to the voters?

 
GERM-WAR: THE GREAT EQUALIZER
(SUPERMAN HASN'T NOTICED THE KRYPTONITE)

We now face a strange world where some unknown proportion of
one billion Muslims worldwide are roused against their
'infidel Western oppressors' (especially vs. U.S.A.) Except for Pakistan, they have no nukes. But they do--or soon will--have access to war supergerms perhaps modified genetically to be resistant to our vaccines/antibiotics. And some of these people
are eager to die while attacking us.

HOW DOES THIS CHANGE THE WORLD
BALANCE OF POWER?

We also have such supergerms. In fact we invented them (as we have invented most of the horrible weapons existing today). But we let the secret out. (One scientist just published an article telling how to turn a harmless relative of smallpox into a virulent one.)

Till now, we have been the MASTER RACE. We have thousands of H-bombs, super-planes, submarine missiles, robots replacing foot-soldiers, etc.
And our superiority will not lapse: the Bush team has announced officially that we will launch a first strike vs. any nation who even tries to catch up with us in weapons. We can wipe out
any opposing nation quickly and easily.

Trouble is, the big threat facing us now is NOT from NATIONS!
We can't use any of this nifty hardware vs. thousands of individual terrorists who are (a) eager to die, (b) easily able to sneak into the U.S., like the millions of 'illegals' already here, and
(c) easily able to smuggle in lethal material (the volume they need is far less than the tons of cocaine and heroin coming in now.)

However, we think we can counter any war-germs
with our ingenious vaccines/antibiotics--whereas the homelands of our primitive foes will be completely vulnerable to the germs we throw at them.

BUT we have also come up with ingenious programs like
the 'genome project', which teaches scientists EVERYWHERE
how to modify genetic makeup easily,so as to make NEW GERMS resistant to our vaccines/antibiotics.
Already, scientists have published articles telling how to create live POLIO viruses from non-living chemicals.

There will be a RACE between scientists working on new vaccines/antibiotics, vs. other scientists developing resistant germs. The germ-makers need only to make germs unlike
any germs before--these,it seems, COULDN'T have effective vaccines/antibiotics aimed at them. It seems--for the near future--that the new-germ-inventors will win the race.
(later: A top army scientists has revealed that we have many vaccines vs. war-germs, but the govt. has not moved to put these into mass-production. That suggests that the govt. is not counting on vaccines to counter germ-war, but rather is counting on quarantines only. (See later blog on 12 Jan).
So suddenly the whole human race--rich or poor, scientific or primitive--are equally vulnerable.
(After all, quarantine is the primitive response to epidemics.)
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes long ago said that humans count as equal, because they are all
EQUALLY KILLABLE. Suddenly this seems to be true.
You'd think people (and their leaders) would see clearly now that we all have an equal stake in peace, and equal reason for horror at the mere thought of war. But c'mon--humanity was not cowed by the very real threat of worldwide nuclear disaster-- why be intimidated now?
Take America--we're already entangled in our Afghan war,
yet our government looniesare rushing toward a second war with Iraq!
There's a good chance that right now the terrorists don't have access to SUPERgerms; it's generally thought that Saddam does have this access. The CIA says that if we don't invade, Saddam will probably be too sensible to give his supergerms to terrorists--HE FEARS OUR AWESOME RETALIATION. However, if we do invade, and Saddam sees that he is doomed,
he has nothing to lose--then he'll gladly give his supergerms to the terrorists eager to die while attacking THE GREAT SATAN.

 
"THE BEST DEFENSE IS A GOOD OFFENSE"--NONSENSE !

Russia has attacked Chechens for 100 years, yet Russia couldn't ward off the Moscow theatre attack--and more such attacks lie ahead. (The Chechens brought down a Russ helicopter, loaded with dozens of soldiers, with a ground-to-air missile--and in late December '02
they blew up a building containing pro-Russ Chechen officials, causing several hundred casualties.)
Israel attacks Palestine regularly, yet Israelis die regularly from Palestinian 'martyrs'.
We bombed Afghanistan heavily , yet experts say Al Quaeda is stronger than before!

Why do Americans believe this silly slogan? When a caged animal is subjected to electric shock, its first reaction is to bite a smaller animal nearby. This reaction is 'hard-wired' into animals, and into us, by evolution. Rage (STRIKE BACK AT SOMEONE!) is a more pleasant emotion than fear, which seeks to ward off attacks.

But humans are supposed to have REASON also, to see when such a rage-reaction is stupid and self-destructive.

Now our government tells us that the best way to ward off terrorists is to INVADE IRAQ.
This is really silly; this invasion will probably put our homeland MORE AT RISK
from terrorists, for two reasons:
--There are ONE BILLION Muslims all over the world. Muslim rage at bombed Iraqi women and children will make it easier to recruit terrorists who are eager to die attacking U.S., THE GREAT SATAN.
--The terrorists now don't have access to supergerms; Saddam does have such access.
But he won't share now with terrorists, because he sensibly fears U.S. nukes.
However, when we invade, when Saddam thinks HE IS DOOMED, HE HAS NOTHING TO LOSE, then he will gladly SHARE his supergerms with the terrorists, who will be glad to deliver them to our homeland.
They can get at us, slipping easily into our country, as do about one million 'illegals' a year--
and easily smuggling in the lethal materials they need (far less in volume than the tons of illegal drugs coming in now.)
Our government now gives 1000 million dollars per DAY to the Pentagon, mainly for bombers and missiles to attack other nations--all this hardware is pretty useless against terrorists.
Very little of our resources are devoted to Home Defense, which is disgracefully inadequate.
We can destroy any other nation easily--but we can't defend ourselves. We are like a
hugely over-muscled body-builder who can't defend himself. America is a giant WEAKLING.
We are also giant fools, to invade Iraq with no real allies. Our GI's will get the poison gas all alone, with almost no other ground troops helping.
Tony Blair talks as if he'd help us--but half of Britons oppose the war--and no one expects Britain and Australia to offer more than a few hundred ground troops, to work with the half-million U.S. GIs that could be 'placed in harm's way'--this time this latter silly slogan has a real meaning!)