I owe my life to two world wars

 On this Armistice Day, I think about the military service of my grandfather, whom I barely met, and of his only son, my father.

Although both of them were American, my father's parents met in France. I know even less of his mother than I do of his father, because of the way that circumstances broke up their family years later, so I don't know why she was in France, but Grandpère, as we knew him, went there with the American military forces. I don't even know how they met, because the endgame of their family was so difficult for my father that we let him tell us what he wanted, when he wanted. Whether he was dealing well with the trauma or not, he had plastered over it heavily to hide the cracks. He could not let it bother him, because his profession depended on strength and invulnerability.

After the Great War, my father's parents lived in Paris, where Grandpère attempted to continue his operatic singing career. He'd been emerging as a new talent in the Chicago area before the US entry into the conflict in Europe pulled him away. I have no idea whether he was further hampered by any carnage he might have seen or perpetrated, but the operatic career did not take off. Still, the couple were living a comfortable life as my father recalls it, until the 1929 stock market crash sent its economic waves through the wider world. At least that's what the young child was told was the cause of the family's rapid decline in fortunes and living spaces. But they were starting to rebuild by the late 1930s, only to be displaced again by a troublesome German. They left France in 1939 as World War II broke out across Europe. They landed in New York.

The family situation deteriorated, with his mother hospitalized and his father going off in search of work and -- I'm guessing -- a measure of solace, based on what little I know of the events. My father was left to live at a friend's house while he finished his last year at a pretty fancy prep school, where he was a scholarship student, not a rich kid riding daddy's money to educational credentials appropriate to the business he would inherit. One of his classmates inherited the New York Times. Meanwhile, Dad ended up fending for himself, working for a boat yard on City Island, for a bike shop, and in the offices of the Boy Scouts of America. He'd been a scout since his childhood in France, and was an Eagle Scout in every respect.

By this time, America was in the war. My father had gone to college, entering MIT, but all of the stresses on him hurt him academically. His only achievement was on the water, kicking ass in sailboat races for the school team. The coach at the Coast Guard Academy suggested that he enlist, and then apply to take the academy entrance exam. The Coast Guard Academy took applicants solely on merit, without congressional appointments. This my father did. He expected to get sent off to drive landing craft onto beaches, but instead ended up in a construction detail in Florida, and other odd bits, before entering the academy in 1945.

Meanwhile, my mother was growing up in central New Jersey, and chose Connecticut College as her next step after high school. Adjacent to the academy, the all-women's school provided a convenient dating pool for the all-male inmates across the road. Thus the streams of life eventually converged.

During the years of the Korean Conflict, my father had been on ice breaker duty in the Arctic, and on Baffin Island, building and manning a LORAN station. The fight against global communism had many fronts. His later trips to Europe to discuss search and rescue agreements with friendly governments also included navigational enhancements that would aid in the guidance of doomsday weapons against the USSR, back when those had to be more personally delivered.

Over the course of his career, the Coast Guard evolved from a very military organization shaped by its wartime and Cold War activities, to an "agency," under the Department of Transportation. The ships still had guns, but fewer, and smaller. At that, they'd never bristled with the armament sported by naval vessels. Even so, the world I was born into had short hair and attempts at household discipline commensurate with a family in service to its country. But the 1960s were coming.

My father attended the US Naval War College in Newport, RI, in the school year 1964-'65. Thus, my older brother and I attended a local school our parents chose. It was my first experience as a "new kid," but in a navy town with not only the War College but a regular base, transient students were common. I was only in third grade, but I understood that my father believed that our adventure in Vietnam was a bad idea. His conviction was built on practical considerations, risk-benefit analysis, and the difficulties of counterinsurgency for the conventional military forces, it wasn't bleeding-heart hippie bullshit. Nevertheless, his position didn't help him in the more gung-ho climate that developed around the domestic politics of the war.

Through various ups and downs, triumphs and setbacks, he stuck it out, achieving, among other things, the first two seasons of all-year navigation through the Great Lakes in the mid 1970s. Wherever he served, he solved many more problems than he left for others to solve.

My father remained in the Coast Guard until 1979, retiring as a captain. He had been passed over on his first flag board, where existing admirals review aspiring admirals, and everything they know about each other gets weighed in the decision. It's not uncommon to need a couple of shots to make it, if at all, but after about 35 years he was ready to try life on the outside.

A few years ago, well after his retirement, our family was sitting around considering alternate courses our lives could have taken. My father said that he had wished that his family had stayed in France during the Nazi occupation. They could have done it, others did. I felt myself disappear. If he had stayed there, none of his children would be here, though he might have had other children. The specific entities created by his union with my mother would not have happened. If the war had not displaced him, he would have stayed, they would have stayed. My parents would not have met.

This doesn't make me grateful to Hitler or happy that things worked out the way they did. If I never existed I would never know it. But it was startling to consider how tremendous world upheavals led to families like mine, completely unrelated to the historical issues of the conflicts, but entirely the product of the movements of the little people caught up therein. There must be millions of us who are war children without ever being near a war.

The homophobic and misogynistic words of George Carlin

Recently, I was severely castigated in a Facebook comment thread for using the term "boob" in the humorous exchange that had formed underneath a meme, posted by a woman, using this picture:

My initial comment was, "teenage boy designs own bedroom." This received lots of laugh emojis, including from the original poster. Then some guy posted that I had left out lots of other demographics that would also enjoy the visual effect depicted. In my response, I explained that I wasn't trying to exclude any other "boob fanciers," but brevity won out over complete detail. The original poster of the image then chastised me harshly for using the word, "boob."

I hate to offend anyone inadvertently. If I'm going to offend someone, I want it to be a carefully calculated maneuver that I might very well regret for the rest of my life, but was at least done with my feet shoulder width apart and the slap or jab delivered precisely. So I brooded. I reflected on my entire history with the term "boob" for breasts. Breasts, by the way, was the acceptable term I was directed to, after I edited the offending comment to what I thought was a humorously overly elaborate descriptor of the anatomical detail at issue.

My awareness of the wider world began in the 1960s. As a younger sibling of the counterculture, I was old enough to feel like almost a part of it, but too young actually to be one. I was part of that generation's trickle-down dilution of culture into cosplay, as happens with any generation's trend setters who have to see their hair styles and clothing go mainstream and end up on school kids and toddlers.  I was a hopelessly unhip dipshit, but I tried hard, which only made it worse. It never got better.

My first guide into hipness was my cool cousin, who was the oldest child in her branch of the family. She knew the names of all the musicians who were calling out the failures of the establishment in poetry and song. She was a Wiccan and a pagan and dressed accordingly. She pierced my younger sister's ears old school, with a big needle, after numbing the earlobes with ice. It was a rite of passage that my sister endured with the bravery of any youngster on the verge of puberty, going through painful rituals to achieve another notch toward adult status. It wasn't old school then, it was common practice. She also guided me through my first purchase of blue jeans that weren't just little kid dungarees. And she tried to teach me, over the ensuing years, a few things about language and culture -- as she saw it -- regarding the mode average sexual relations between men and women. Among her stated preferences, she specifically stated that she thought that the word "breasts" was stuffy and stilted, that "tits" was unacceptably crude, and that "boobs" struck the perfect balance of informal and lighthearted.

In 1972, George Carlin presented the world with the list of seven words you can never say on television. They became a mantra. Shit, piss fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. For a conscientious Profanitarian, shit, piss, fuck, and motherfucker remain. But cocksucker can be considered both homophobic, and hypocritical as an insult, if one possesses a penis and accepts the ministrations of a fellationist. And of course cunt and tits are crude references to female anatomy. To some philosophers, no man should utter any reference to female anatomy whatsoever, unless it's part of their duly trained and educated profession. We can spiral off some other time into the question of whether any man should ever be allowed into a profession or trade that requires any reference to female anatomy. But even within the strictures of the first proposition, that no man shall speak of female anatomy unless licensed to do so, most of us are unlicensed to do so.

Working in a bike shop, I do get presented with anatomical details relating to the part of the body that endures contact with a bicycle seat. In that context I do have to hear and use terms describing the female intimate anatomy. Most of those questions can be answered with generic solutions related to saddle shape and position, without ever mentioning the human parts in contact with it. On rare occasions someone will go into graphic, specific detail. In that case I guess I am granted a limited term, temporary license. Even so, I can get by without speaking of the forbidden, only prescribing remedies using the inanimate bicycle saddle and its position in three dimensions.

When one is limited in speech by social strictures, one must rehearse mentally. Otherwise, when called upon to speak of the forbidden topics in a licensed, public setting, one may blurt something offensive, or lose so much time choosing words that one appears incompetent.

The problem is most challenging for the male, the white male in particular. As the dominant players in the rise of civilization, we've grown accustomed to setting the standards to which all others must adhere. This is hardly to say that we represent a true meritocracy. It's merely a testament to the power that bullies have in shaping group behavior over a wider and wider area. White men and their allies will admonish everyone else not to be thin-skinned ninnies when it comes to enduring taunts and slang that owe their origins to hierarchical interpretations that put the white guy on top. The groups under this regime have responded with increasingly rebellious humor through the decades, leading now to increasing insistence on recognition. White men and their allies are pushing back. That doesn't make them right. But it would be a mistake to make them all wrong, too. Beyond the whiteness, men in general possess undesirable tendencies that are the source of their strength and the root of their evil. We, the male, can generally be discounted, but you still want to be absolutely sure that a white, male achievement was stolen from someone of another hue or gender before pissing on it.

Day by day one learns what you can say to whom. As I have striven always to limit my offensiveness only to those who should be offended, I fight a tendency to play with language for humorous value, and to seek audience approval in the form of laughs or appreciative feedback. In a perfect future, people will all, voluntarily and without a dystopian legal framework, just dress in gray and walk past each other quietly. If we have business to conduct, we will conduct it. Sex work will be legalized as a therapeutic service engaged in without emotion or particular excitement. People's own homes might be filled with color and emotive activity, but it stays inside the enclave. Nothing will be forbidden. The underground world can be as bright and wild as one wishes. Go drinking. Go dancing. Go find some fun and have it. But the public face will be gray block buildings, gray clothes, emotionless commerce. The default of interaction will be as sterile as one can be. Any departure from that accepts the terms and conditions that go with any assumption of risk.

Kyle Rittenhouse has to defend himself

 Teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse has been on trial since the night that he shot three people, killing two. He has been praised or condemned, and subjected to media analysis for more than a year. At the end of his actual trial, just getting underway, he will be found guilty or innocent of the charges of murder and attempted murder. He will remain a polarizing figure in the historical record no matter how he fares in court.

Teenagers do ill-considered things. We consider the ones who get themselves killed as unlucky, but the ones whose rash decisions lead to the deaths of others face a lifelong challenge. Depending on how the deaths occurred, they might be harder or easier to rationalize. Accepting responsibility for a fatal error is always hard, but when the error was an active decision to use deadly force to end someone else's life the bar is at its highest.

True remorse is a life sentence without parole. It's one thing to get drunk with your buddies and crash your car, killing one or more of the passengers while you, the driver, survive. There was probably a certain degree of consent among the partying carload. It is easier to rationalize drunken teens playing with a gun than it is to accept that a sober and well-intentioned -- however misguided -- boy picked up a rifle and was willing to walk into a volatile scene of social unrest and make snap decisions in combat with people he identified as disposable.

Humans react to the threat of violence in two ways: fight or flight. These two reactions may mix in strange ways, as you see in videos of demonstrators clashing with either law enforcement or self-appointed keepers of the peace, in the posture of someone who tries to deliver a blow while simultaneously turning to retreat. You see it in street altercations and playground fights, the untrained actions of fear and anger. Adrenaline flows, the brain buzzes, the body tries to interpret the commands, and neither the fists nor the feet look heroic.

Carrying a weapon that extends your deadly capability many yards in front of you generates some degree of confidence. That confidence frays rapidly when an actual confrontation calls for clear decision making. Supposedly trained police officers have trouble making the right choice every time. Military personnel discover the difference between training and reality when they are actually attacked. Knowing how to handle a gun is not enough. You have to know how to handle yourself. Elite units are elite units not because of their weaponry, but because of their ability. As with so many other human endeavors, the ones who turn out to be excellent prove that we are not all created equal. We are equal in moral responsibility and in our right to be treated fairly, but not in the distribution of qualities that favor achievement in one realm or another.

Kyle went looking for trouble. He may have hoped that his armed presence would subdue the unhappy mob without the need to take any out, but he was equipped to kill, and he did so. Whether it was self defense in the actual instant, he didn't have to be there at all. He decided that he could help the beleaguered business owners of Kenosha by showing up armed at an already inflamed situation, to act more or less independently of any centralized command.

He meant well, within his world view. At least it appears that way. That makes it worse for him, because it makes him more vulnerable to himself, should he decide that he was completely unjustified from the outset. He must defend himself against the worst interpretation of his own actions. No one can protect him from that. He can decide to absorb the approval of his supporters and use that to block any notion that he did something really wrong. It may come easily. But if it fails, he will be left with his own inner voice reminding him every day that two people are dead because of choices he made. It will form a wall between him and deep happiness, unless he can write off the lives of his targets as just a lesson learned in youthful indiscretion. The compulsion to defend himself, even from himself, is powerful and normal. He has to live with himself.

Poor towns get stuck making bad deals

 The Effingham Zoning Board completed a long case this year in which an applicant asked for the necessary permissions to reinstate gasoline service at a convenience store that had removed its pumps and tanks six years ago, when new standards would have required them to replace their existing fuel facilities with new ones that met stricter standards for pollution control.

The mandate from the state, following on federal guidelines, skewed the requirement to favor larger corporations or wealthier store operators who could afford to front the cost to install the upgraded systems. Poorer stores could get a grant to quit the gasoline business completely and have all of the old fuel supply equipment removed at no cost to the store owners. There was no aid to upgrade the equipment. Go big on your own dime, or go away. The store here in Effingham opted to go away.

Without fuel sales, the convenience store relied on its deli and other retail offerings. The owners soon put the business up for sale.

The store is on the westbound side of Route 25. Within a quarter of a mile to the west, another, older store is located on the other side of the highway, convenient to eastbound traffic. The left turn into it from westbound Route 25 can be stressful at times when traffic is heavy. It's never as heavy here as it is in densely populated areas where truly heavy traffic is the norm, but it can get thick and fast enough to make the turn across its flow a bit tense, as one watches the rear view mirror for missiles coming up from behind as well. It was nice having an option on either side. And the older store is actually in Ossipee, so its tax revenue does nothing for Effingham.

The Ossipee valley is both blessed and cursed with the largest stratified drift aquifer in the state of New Hampshire. Stratified drift aquifers are the most productive reservoirs of ground water, but their water absorbing properties and the speed of its transmission through them make them especially vulnerable to pollution, such as the threat presented by buried tanks of the toxic chemicals on which our motor vehicles and transportation system rely.

The most vulnerable parts of the aquifer tend to be the flattest and most attractive to road construction and development. Back when people moved on foot or behind animals whose exhaust products were large and tangible but readily biodegradable, this coincidence did not present a problem. The more we came to rely on chemicals that we should really avoid drinking, and put more and more septic systems into that nice flat ground, the more bad things crept -- or poured -- into the aquifer when things went wrong.

When you know better, you do better, at least ideally. Certainly there's at least some public pressure not to poison people's wells, although concern diminishes with distance. As one native resident of the east side of Effingham remarked about a proposed race track on the west side of town back in the 1990s, "It wasn't near me, so I didn't care about it." But a little at a time we manage to increase people's awareness that problems have a way of creeping closer. You may never care about the people who live a mile away, let alone a longer distance, but maybe you'll figure out that your turn will come eventually, and you should figure out what your principles are.

Principles are not absolute. Idealists might have absolute principles, which is why they're useful as philosophers, but often disastrous in government. You have to lay the template of an ideal across the actual landscape of the place itself and the people who live there, and find a way forward that helps more than it hurts.

On the first application, for the Special Exception to have a gas station in town, the applicant appeared to have a decent case, since there had been a gas station on that site from 1997 to 2015, and it had not been discontinued due to any specific violation. It was only in site plan review at the Planning Board that someone noted that the convenience store and former gas station was located in the groundwater protection overlay district. The groundwater protection overlay district is based on the vulnerability of the aquifer presented by the particular soils mapped and defined in it. Until 2015 there were three gasoline stations on Route 25 between Route 16 and the Maine border. All of them are disastrously sited by the terms of the groundwater protection overlay district, and all of them were grandfathered, because they predated the ordinance by many years. Two of them upgraded their equipment by 2015 and continued to operate. They are also in other towns, not in Effingham. Thus they represent little value to Effingham's coffers.

The applicants had to return to the ZBA for a variance to allow them to put a prohibited use -- the gas station -- into the groundwater protection district. While the Special Exception had been pretty straightforward, the variance was not. It was gasoline versus drinking water. But it was also a functioning, tax-paying business that was reinstating a use that had already been there without incident for 18 years before it was discontinued. While there was some evidence of minor leakage in the soil samples taken when the tanks were removed, no one with a well nearby had reported pollution, and no evidence of it had appeared in surface streams that flow near the property. The new tanks would have to meet the standards that replacement tanks would have met in 2015, if the previous owners had put them in right away without delay. But gas stations are notorious sources of pollution, which was why they were prohibited in the district.

The deliberation was not an easy one. The resulting approval was not unanimous. But, as the dissenter, I fully understand the reasoning by which approval was granted. A variance has to meet five criteria to pass. It can't meet three out of five or four out of five. A majority of board members must agree that the application satisfies all five of these criteria. I felt that the application did not satisfy all criteria, but these decisions rely on interpretation. Specifically in this case, approval of the variance is not supposed to be contrary to the public interest,  but the choice was between the public interest of an improved economy and tax base versus the possibility of groundwater contamination. Were we better served to expand an existing business back to its original level of services, or to insist that anyone who wanted such a business had to find a site with acceptable soils? This would require the environmental disruption of a piece of undeveloped land, and I'm not sure such soils exist along Route 25 within Effingham. As for anywhere else in town, I'm hard pressed to think of any other town road on which you could put a convenience store and have it actually be convenient.

The only other through route is Route 153, which runs down the eastern edge of town so closely that it's actually in Maine for a short stretch. In South Effingham, one side of the road is New Hampshire and the other side of the road is Maine. There used to be a store in South Effingham, with gas pumps, but it was on the Maine side of the road. Ha ha! No tax revenue for you, Effingham, even though the family that lives all over that part of town lives on both sides of the road. It's one community in two states, living in bucolic tranquility untroubled by their respective state capitals. But when the tax bills come, the money divides like a watershed, flowing each toward a different town hall, eventually sending some to Augusta and some to Concord.

 The middle of Effingham is a compact mountain range about seven or eight miles west to east, and perhaps five miles south to north. Its highest peak is Green Mountain at the east end. The range tapers down over successively lower summits to Welch Top on the west end. The granite mass is separate from any other mountain system in the area, surrounded almost entirely by the glacial sediments of the Ossipee Aquifer. No roads cross it. The ones that used to cut into its flanks are not maintained all the way through.

The gas station on Route 25 represents the difficult bargains made by poor towns. If Green Mountain contained mineral resources that some corporation was willing to pay big money to extract, rest assured that it would be called Green Canyon by now. Remember also that the bigger the business, the more they will chisel for tax breaks. And the jobs they bring may be hazardous for workers who are inadequately compensated for that risk. The bulk of the profits generally go to executives and investors who don't even live in the town. Should a town do it? By some measures, absolutely not. What's lost is irreplaceable. But at some point you have to pay for basic services for the people who do live there. In the case of a state of the art gas station, the guarantee of harm is replaced by a gamble on the updated standards and on the operators' willingness, ability, and luck in maintaining a clean operation that will prosper sufficiently to make it a genuine asset.

What kind of businesses are appropriate on the aquifer that would actually be profitable and provide reliable tax revenue to the town? You could throw out a shingle for all kinds of cute and clean ideas, but will you make enough money to continue? Something grubby and mundane like a gas station serves everyone. Yes, we need to end the era of petroleum immediately, to save the environment on which all life depends, but so far we haven't, and the business model remains quite normal. If and when our species gets around to shutting down the industry, the end of the profits will be a problem for the investors who chose to hang on. This includes the gas station in question. Humans invented their way into this mess. Whoever survives will do their best to invent their way out.

Running even a small town takes more time and attention than just showing up once a week or once a month for a two-hour meeting. That's why town board positions tend to be filled by retired people or people whose work schedule allows them the flexibility to put time into training and research. You do get the self-serving scallywags who use their position for personal gain, like contractors on planning and zoning boards, and selectmen who steer contracts to their cronies. But you also get sincere individuals who are trying to do as good a job as they can for the ordinary people who trust them to find the balance.

We had a selectman for a while who was very active finding grants and other funding mechanisms to reduce the direct burden on local taxpayers, and who promoted the idea that anything we did spend money on should be built to last, so that we didn't have to spend more money on it soon afterward. But he annoyed some people who marshaled enough voters to vote him out by a slim margin, because fiscal efficiency is nice, but nobody likes a smartass. Thus do small towns shoot themselves in the foot over petty grievances. He also was pretty good at observing the conflicting effects and unintended consequences of town ordinances, and seeking a balance among competing wants and needs. He wasn't always right, but he asked good questions and facilitated discussion. He had served on a number of other town boards, including zoning, and returned to the ZBA as an alternate after he was no longer on the select board.

The approval of the gas station is probably going to be challenged in court. The denial would have been challenged by the opposite party. The conflicts are clear cut to their partisans. It will be interesting to see how the next level deals with it.

My brother, the climate refugee or: Apocalypse Shortly

 My baby brother, who is now in his fifties, was the only one of my siblings to reproduce. As such, he is the only one with a serious stake in the future of the planet. I'm afraid my cynicism kept me from betting anyone's life that humans would get their heads on straight and avoid the many forms of destruction now set on what appear to be an unstoppable course toward a major disruption that many of us would call disaster.

From cursory study of snippets of information that flit across my screen, I gather that New England won't be a bad place to weather the new climate. At least it will be less worse than a lot of other places. My brother referred to this when he asked me about available tracts of land on which to establish a survivalist homestead.  When he first mentioned it, the idea was for all of us to go in on a parcel of more than 100 acres for us all to use. This overlooks the fact that none of us have any money, and that the coronavirus pandemic has skewed real estate values sharply upward. My part of New England has seen a bit of a building boom as people who can work remotely have joined the existing flow of homesteaders of various persuasions coming up to establish their private kingdoms independent of government interference.

Once we've really gutted government, no one will hold you to any standards homeschooling your kids. You can teach them any damn thing you like without worrying about "accreditation." It will be man against nature once again, on a smaller scale than strip mining and multi-national corporations. The person polluting your well and clouding your skies will more likely be your neighbor, if it isn't you yourself. There will be fewer lawsuits and more blood feuds. Keep it simple.

My brother's next thought was a mere ten acres, which is quite doable. But you want to guarantee good sun exposure for the garden, good water, and decent soil. Soil can be improved, but if you have to do a lot of clearing and stumping it will take a lot of time. Early settlers spent years enlarging a small patch and improving its soil, and still saw subsequent generations high tail it to the Midwest as soon as the country expanded to a place that already had actual soil instead of fields full of rocks.

A farm that will support a small family will not support two, three, four small families as the offspring mature and want to breed. This simple math propelled our species from central Africa all up and out across the globe, and then led to all the restless back-and-forth invading, repelling, emigrating, assimilating, and general wandering that has created our tribes, our borders, and our generational habits of enmity and sharp dealing.

In the 1970s, apocalyptic fiction and predictive nonfiction were already popular. As a fencer, I looked forward to a post apocalyptic world in which firearms were reduced to primitive forms or had perhaps become impossible to maintain. I was vague about how it would happen, but it fit my preferred scenario. I grooved a little on all the cool opportunities to win in single combat and receive the favors of impressed females. But you have to be pretty intellectually and emotionally stunted for that image to survive any lengthy contemplation. Besides, after college I was starting to value the fruits of modern civilization. I didn't really want the world to end, and I couldn't understand why so many people seemed eager for it.

Sadly, I understand it better now. A lot of people have never gotten the hang of civilization, and yearn for a genuinely simpler life. Nasty, brutish and short it might be, but it will be straightforward. Survive to maturity. Breed. Stay alive as long as you can. Cooperate only as necessary to enhance your individual survival and that of your bloodline. It's basically a reset to the invention of civilization in the first place.

Some apocalypticists are more well read than that. They've studied history, and know some of the pitfalls to avoid. It's not going to be a sudden reset to a dispersed population in a renewed wilderness or perfect pastorality.

The wealthy only want enough disruption to keep the general population frightened and vulnerable. All of their wealth is based on abstract things. There will be no stock market, and, therefore, no vast fortunes with which to hire all of the professionals a king will need to maintain power and security in a reality-based world.

Most apocalyptic fantasies of the post World War II era were based on war as the societal disruptor. Violence would usher in the change very quickly, possibly with a period of conventional warfare as well as nuclear destruction. The climate catastrophe is more of a slow-motion collapse, in which the combat will be more widespread, at a lower level than full-out conventional war. There will be no logical reason for nuclear blasts, although some psychotic despot somewhere might decide to chuck what he's got, just to see what it looks like, since we're all boned anyway. Let's assume that doesn't happen, and that the collapse unrolls steadily in waves of migration, crowding the spaces with water and soil beyond their capacity fairly rapidly. Even though a lot of people will be dying, the remaining population will have to use a smaller area than we have now.

You can't really hedge the bet. Even though our best chance is to try to head off the worst effects, that requires a commitment to civilization, staying in place as much as possible while working to improve conditions from where you are. Or you can run off now and set up your fortifications, but you can't really contribute to the solution if you've assumed its failure.

Homesteads will be hard to defend. I see a meme online that sneers at the people stockpiling weapons and doing nothing to acquire tools, supplies, and skills with which to make and grow what they will need to live, but the weapon fanciers have learned from history that you don't need to do all that stuff yourself if you are well armed and skilled at hurting people, because you can go take what you want from the farmers and the makers. Who were the kings? Not the farmers and the makers. They were warriors, who held their place by kicking ass. Your Second Amendment types will say that it couldn't happen here because we have a tradition of armed citizens with a right to defend themselves. Sure, but what happens when the badass with more or better guns, and more people, comes along and wants your stuff? What happens when you're concentrating on farm work, because you know how to do that too, and a sniper blows your head off as the first move to invading your farm?

Before you know it, we've recreated society with a warrior caste, and farmers and makers all beholden to their defenders, and it's a long damn time before someone suggests that maybe we should just vote on stuff.

If it's all just going to evolve into the same mess we have now, let's just operate the mess we have now, and try to tweak it into a better form. Either that or completely demolish any semblance of civilization and go back to living naked in warm climates and scrounging for whatever we can find. And you'll still end up getting jumped by some bigger scrounger who figured out he can beat your ass and take your fruit.

Veterans of the Covid Insurrection

 Because everything in the United States has to turn into a stupid argument if not an outright gunfight, response to the global pandemic has been no exception, including the brandishing of firearms as the proponents of liberty bellow their defiance. Sides have been chosen all over the world. The US is not the only place in which oppositional defiance and paranoia have hampered perfectly reasonable procedures to restrict the spread of a new and contagious disease that can kill people fairly readily.

None of this is news to anyone who has not been in a coma for the past year. With every piece of good news about containment and prevention of Covid-19 comes a volley back about how the disease isn't serious, how the dead we're losing are just old people who would die soon anyway, how the disease itself -- though not serious -- was created in a Chinese lab as an attack on America, or possibly commissioned by the Deep State to help enslave ordinary citizens, and how the vaccine is in various ways tainted.

Live free or die. The sentiment is hardly limited to New Hampshire, where adherence to disease precautions has been average or better. But it perfectly describes how the heroes of the biological warfare insurrection view their cause. They bravely risk getting the sniffles to prove to the cowardly mask wearers that life is to be lived and death is to be embraced. And occasionally one of them gets very sick. Some die. Heroes all.

The rest of the quote from General John Stark is that death is not the worst of evils. Death isn't the only consequence of Covid-19. Some people suffer long-term ill effects. But the dead and the long-haulers are still in the minority. Most who get the disease and survive have their story to tell, about barely being sick, or feeling like they had a nasty flu, or even being so trampled that they had trouble drawing a full breath, and lay in delirious fevers for days. That's if they didn't have to be hospitalized. But if they survived and recovered, clearly there was nothing to worry about. And now they're immune, right? Problem solved. Challenge faced and overcome. That which did not kill them not only made them stronger, it confirmed them in their arrogance.

Once in a while you hear of one who repented and bore witness to the world that they were wrong, and that we should take this disease seriously. Wimps. Softies. When this is all over in a few months we'll all be drinking and laughing together about how so many people got duped into wearing masks and getting vaccinated with some pharmaceutical company's experimental drug, while the brave and proud remained valorous and philosophically pure. And had fun.

A half a million dead is a tiny fraction of the total population of the United States. This will be swept aside by the return of mass entertainment and the distractions of political theater.

Freedom of $peech?

If I tossed 5 or 10 bucks at every worthy cause that sent me a "fundraising alert" I could easily blow through close to $100 a day. If this is to gain political leverage over the tiny faction of the population who can afford to throw millions of dollars at Congress on a regular basis, how long can we be expected to try to beat them at their own game?

Members of congress willing to rock the gravy boat seem few in number, so I don't know how we can really get big money out of politics. Meanwhile, expecting nickel-and-dime grassroots fundraising to continue to finance political positions that go against the interests of the wealthy is like expecting your health insurance premiums not to keep surging upward. I don't know about you, but I can easily be outspent. Is that how we want to decide whose ideas get to be heard?

When stockholders vote in corporate elections, those with the most shares get to make the decisions. Any small holders have to live with that. In our government we are supposed to have equal voices, so that the points of view of all citizens are taken into account. Instead we have another shareholder meeting in which the big players tell the little people what to do.

Revolution IS called for, since we can't get enough elected officials into office to make the change using what's left of our political system. But a shooting war is a stupid gambit. Just refuse to cooperate. Ride a bike. Walk. Live on less. Detach as much as possible from the corporate-controlled economy. That may mean a pretty primitive lifestyle for quite a while -- maybe a couple of generations. But think how much more primitive and brutal life would be in a country torn by civil war.

Corporatocracy will not give up easily. Their forces may lash out. Put the moral burden on them by living inoffensively.

Stimulus checks are an abomination!

 My little daily news blurb from the New York Times this morning featured a pro-con analysis of the direct $2,000 stimulus checks proposed as part of the Biden administration's coronavirus relief package. The checks would actually be $1,400, building on the $600 already sent out by the previous administration, but the total we're kicking around for purposes of argument is $2,000.

The arguments in favor of the direct payment all made sense, as did one of the arguments against it. But, as usual, the other arguments from the conservative side were completely insensitive to the realities of daily financial life for working class Americans.

First the argument against the $2,000, that is even remotely arguable: The money could be used to increase unemployment benefits for the people who really need it, giving a prorated amount of direct payment to people with less need. It's more complicated than simply handing out checks, and could lead to complaints that the targeted system misses in some cases. But there are complaints now. The current stimulus proposal includes enhanced unemployment benefits, with the direct payment added to them. One fix could be ongoing stimulus checks, as proposed by progressive Democratic members of Congress.

The other arguments against stimulus checks came from conservative fantasyland. The first stated that the stock market is doing great, and that the value of housing has actually gone up, so people are doing well financially, and will simply put the $2,000 in the bank, not stimulating the economy at all. Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute actually called the checks "an abomination."Are they really that unobservant, or are they merely hoping that everyone else is? Most people have stock holdings in a retirement account. The value is comforting -- until you realize that it could all be wiped out by a "market correction" the day before you retire -- but it doesn't help with the day to day expenses unless you tap into that reserve to meet an emergency need. Money you extract now needs to be made up by investment appreciation or by your further contributions so that it will be there when you do finally try to live on it. As for your home value, that's only liquid if you borrow against it, paying a bank to lend you your own money, or sell your house and have a wad of cash to live on while you're homeless.

The other argument, from conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, was that FDR wouldn't have done it. His plan favors infrastructure programs to put people to work. This neatly forgets how much the New Deal programs were scorned and derided at the time, and -- more importantly -- completely ignores the pandemic that has caused the economic distress in the first place. Manchin can say that he "doesn't remember FDR recommending sending a damn penny to a human being," but FDR wasn't facing a contagious and mysterious illness that would spread through work crews gathered together to work on these projects. We're in a situation like the 1919 flu pandemic, in which the government attempted to promote safe practices like we're seeing today: masks and distance. They met with similar carelessness and opposition. I'd be willing to bet that a pandemic would have altered FDR's calculations and the types of relief offered to the people looking to him for leadership and support.