The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

"The budget should be balanced; the treasury should be refilled; public debt should be reduced..." -Cicero. 106-43 B.C.

If you take Cicero's advice, you condemn yourself, your family, and the nation to a perpetual state of slavery without reward. Is life worth living without SUVs, heated swimming pools, and takeout sushi?

Of course, Cicero is dead (and) wrong. Also, he failed to make the grade with god who thinks different. (But we can forgive him, he was born before god!) The god promised that "meek shall inherit the earth." Time and again the promise is interpreted by the insightful correctly when they choose to live in "calculated poverty." We as Americans are certainly not the first who have discovered our lavish lifestyle in bleeding poverty.

Let us see. US per capita median income is $16000 (4-person family income is $63278, see (http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/4person.html)
US per capita average income is $32000. Our national debt is over $7 trillion, about $25000 per capita (http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/). Over 40 percent of it owned by the weaker nations around the globe. Since these nations are bankrolling us, they must be rich! But for some weird reason they choose to live poor. (This is proof positive that they are genetically inferior animals.)

We are accumulating debt at a rate of about $2000 per capita per year. In 12 years, more than 50 percent of us will have a debt at least 3 times larger than our income. If we use average income, the picture is a bit rosy: it will take a lot longer, like 30 years before we owe 3 times more than the national income.

Before I proceed any further, let me paraphrase Beeble's Law of Improbability: Simply put, it states that human ability to believe goes to zero (0) as the level of exaggeration increases by a factor of three (3). The exact number is e=2.71... but that's another blog.

Applying it to the question at hand, it means our Lordship of Earth will continue its unparalleled rise unabated as we keep selling our treasury bills to increase our meekness. However, what happens when the Law of Improbability limit is reached and the creditor nations become skittish and begin to realize Americans are never going to meet their financial obligations? Do not think it cannot happen: Saddam's greatest sin was that he tried to sell his oil in Euros rather than dollars, and the Indians, financially astute as they are, are already refusing to buy more American treasury bills. When their urge to recoup is bigger than their fear of us, they will want to call in our debt in 12 years or 30. It will begin to disrupt our united front of calculated Christian meekness.

Will we accept this travesty? Will we disinherit the earth? A totally outlandish concept, if you ask me! We shall protect our meekness. We shall fight it with nukes and biochems. We shall send more of our young and stupid to wars. We shall conduct preemptive strikes on terrorist states like France and Spain. We shall re-institutionalize slavery. We shall make the church support the slavery like the good old days. We shall disfranchise the Euro and raid the De Beers diamond vaults to buy back our poverty. We shall keep the title of the meek and the Lordship of Earth. We love our SUVs.

"America über alles"

Greenpeace and Prostitutes

Sailor mongering was rife in the 19th century when brothels sent prostitutes laden with booze onto ships as they made their way to harbor. So they made a law to stop beautiful women from performing their sacred duty.

Today, it is the Greenpeace. The federal government is suing Greenpeace using the obscure Sailor Mogering Law to clip its wings. It is payback time for the environmental group that boarded a freighter in April 2002 carrying illegally felled Amazon mahogany to Miami. The Toxic Texan believes this is a heinous crime since thwarting free trade in green gold (Amazon mahogany), that provides profits better than cocaine, deprives Florida Voters the money they need to feed their under-nourished families and restricts their support to the good-terrorists in Cuba.

The prosecutors are threatening that if they fail to avenge this misdeed using a law that has not been used since the Boston Tea Party to muzzle barking dogs, they will use the Patriot Act to break up this Beer Bash to save the Born-again President from its terrorist fumes.

The federal government believes that this crime is worse than (i) homosexual marriages, (ii) white-washing 9/11 by creating a multi-billion dollar entitlement program called "Airport Security," and (iii) expending 18-year old Marines and uncounted Iraqis to secure black gold for generations of Free American Capitalist Cronies.

They believe that generally ill-informed Americans cannot handle free speech. Citing Greenpeace, Senator John Paul Johannesburg in his press conference last week stated that "the free speech is a dangerous weapon that cannot be freely given to people that oppose the government, do not know the name of their Senator, or their god." He further stated that he is planning to insert language to this effect in the omnibus budget bill as a foot note on page 743 on behalf of the President of the United States.

Dark Matter

If you love dark cold nights, you must hope there is not enough of the dark matter. If you are an arsonist or enjoy pyrotechnics, you must be rooting for lots of it. The Deep freeze or the explosive disappearance is all yours if you can stick around a few billion years.

However, when Lord Keynes opined, "In the end , we are all dead," he was talking about a century or two. Limits to Growth, a Club of Rome study, puts the Armageddon right around 2070s.

Exponential growth is a quaint little concept. It is well understood in science. It is characterized by overshoot followed by catastrophic readjustment when inputs to the system become scarce or the output waste overwhelms the desired outcomes.

But who cares? The world is run by the politicians and economists. One specializes in selling untruths and half-truths for economic gain and the other is adept at using voodoo math and supply of money to prove existence of flat earth and infinite growth.

Malthus did not know about the existence of oil, but he knew his math well. We are straining our resources to the limit: water, land, energy, you name it. And the waste products are mounting: garbage, global temperature, and population. Yes, population, 6.5 billion and counting.

Most scientist I know are pessimistic about finding new water resources on Mars, or in our ability to move the earth a few meters further away from the sun for its cooling effect, and finding an equally abundant, cheap, and concentrated source of energy as gas and oil in time.

Most politicians and economists, on the other hand, have no choice but to believe in science. That belief comes easy as they have no idea how science works. Or, wait for Armageddon.

The Armageddon in this case is a collapse of the world population to pre-oil numbers, about a quarter of what it is today, and return to local economies, some benign, but mostly feudal and repressive.

Cheer up, the fit and prepared will survive. Others will find solace in Jesus and the real Armageddon and walk off the cliff to commiserate with their maker.

Just like you, all I want is a nice balcony seat, caviar, and vodka-popsicles .