The Baby Boomers broke the system, but not the way you think

 While the Boomers are responsible for purposeful acts that made life more difficult for their own children and grandchildren, they started straining the machinery of civilization when they themselves were in school.

The Baby Boom -- as opposed to any birthrate surge known as a baby boom -- officially dates from 1947 to closing dates anywhere from 1960 to 1964. Within that span, the various waves had very different views of the world. The first wave for instance, could go to college, come out with a bachelor's degree, and slide into a good job that might support them for an entire career until retirement. Others might take a different kind of training and find good unionized jobs for similar career security. But the system that developed to process this younger generation was overwhelmed by their numbers by the late 1960s, as the middle of the boom choked the schools and then hit the job market. I was born in 1956. As I approached the end of high school, a bachelor's degree was still a decent ticket to employment. By the time I was in college, students who really wanted to get anywhere with academic credentials were planning for graduate school. And even with that, we had already heard the stories of "PhDs pumping gas."

To get a job, you have to find someone willing and able to pay you. Virtually every high-paying employer had their pick of highly qualified applicants by the mid 1970s, and more kept coming out of the pipeline. A need is not the same as a market. Areas that our species might have needed to work on were not attracting investors. The Boomers followed the money. Consumerism created or enhanced markets and ignored needs.

The Boomers had also grown up with the fantasy that unlimited wealth is not only possible, but okay. Some of us were oblivious and simply imagined stumbling into a fortune and being the cool kind of rich people, who are generous, open-minded, curious, fun, and conveniently well funded. Others were knowingly elitist and ruthlessly competitive, which is what it really takes to be wealthy. Hard work is a small percentage. Focused self interest is the larger part. Feel free to look down on the lowly grunts who merely labor. Maneuver against your peers and near peers, forming and breaking alliances as necessary. Game the system. Take every advantage as you find it. Sportsmanship is for losers.

The apparent prosperity of the 1980s was mostly based on credit and optimism. The recession that ended the decade hit when the bills finally went too far past due. The recovery that made us all feel good in the 1990s happened only because everyone had finally paid their cards down enough to start consuming again. And so we crashed in 2000. Every bad decision was multiplied by increasing numbers of players as the Boom begat Gen X and Gen X begat Gen Z, or however the succession goes. There's always overlap, so there are "generations" that are too young to have been sired by the one immediately ahead of them. But it's safe to say that Boomers stretched the credit and financial systems in the 1980s just as extensively as they had blown the seams on the educational system in the 1970s.

Ultimately, our problems are population problems. Our breeding success combines with our industrialized consumerism with devastating effect. This leads not only to products purposely designed to fail, it makes our own lives cheaper, as the impatient crowd in the queue behind us wants us out of their way.

War in Ukraine: Economics versus morality

 As the consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine continue to expand, major disruptions of food and energy supplies threaten economic stability across the developed world, and actual survival across the Global South. Areas that were under stress are now under much more stress. This will only get worse as the war drags on, and Russia refuses to back down from its unprovoked and immoral act of violence against a neighboring nation.

Vladimir Putin's greed for power drives the nation that he leads to act as his machine to sow chaos for the gain of a wealthy minority. Did Putin know that his forces would not have to sweep to easy victory in Ukraine to generate the leverage that he now enjoys? As long as the war lasts, Russia's power will only grow, because of the strategic importance of Ukraine as a food supplier, and Russia's position as a key player in the fossil fuel economy. The fossil fuel economy still has a choke hold on the world.

From a moral standpoint, the rest of the world should stand united in support of Ukraine against Russia's brutal war of conquest. From an economic standpoint, the rest of the world will see an almost immediate -- though temporary -- improvement in conditions by ceding Ukraine to Russia, perhaps even throwing support behind the old empire's second-rate military to help overrun Ukrainian resistance. As deplorable as Russia is, at least the rule of an authoritarian empire provides a single, known entity to build a strategy against. Think of how wonderfully simple everything seemed during the Cold War.

The United States has already suffered moral damage as our desperation for petroleum has driven us to make amends with Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration had made admirable efforts to recognize the abuses of the Saudi regime, for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and the war in Yemen. Now we are abandoning that stance and kissing up for oil. Stick a bigger flag on your pickup truck for that one.

What do you think? A long, expensive, bloody struggle lasting years and years to uphold the sovereignty of Ukraine and the continued rise of democracy in the world, or cheaper gas and food and shame that will follow us all the rest of our lives? Having chosen petroleum over virtue, those lives will be shorter in any case. The improvements really will only be temporary, as the climate finally goes out of control, and famine and drought envelop more and more of the earth's surface.

The climate collapse gains momentum in either scenario, as we neglect measures to mitigate it because our focus is on the delicate balance of a limited war with an erstwhile superpower or we hit the accelerator with our newly refueled big trucks and motorized toys. War is environmentally devastating, but our consumer version of peace and prosperity is also environmentally devastating.

The best answer would be for Russia to suddenly shake its head and back out of Ukraine with profuse apologies. That ain't happening. We have to figure out in a hurry whether the less worse prospect to reduce global threats is to throw Ukraine to the bears and deal with imperialist Russia or to ratchet up support for Ukraine's defense and hope that it drives Russia back to its borders sooner than later.

Why "gun control" is doomed

Humans have been losing their temper and killing their own kind since before we were humans. We just keep improving the technology.

The AR-15 was created to secure a military contract by providing a more effective weapon for the style of combat American troops were encountering in jungle and urban warfare. It was designed to kill not just people, but people reduced to the status of varmints in the underbrush: dehumanized humans.

Beginning with the American Civil War, mechanized slaughter in warfare started generating shocking numbers of casualties that were quickly rationalized and normalized by supporters of the conflict. Combatant deaths and collateral damage have always been accepted as part of the cost of the revered practice of war. We accepted that we will always have wars, so we'd better keep improving our weaponry to improve our odds of success.

The sale of personal guns reflects on an individual level the defense industry's sale of large-scale weapons to government military forces. Between nations, those arsenals present a deterrent to potential aggressors, or intimidate potential resisters to a powerful nation's overtures to a weaker one with deals that they can't refuse. The dynamic is different on a personal level, where some gun owners like to wear their firepower openly, while others prefer to take advantage of concealment. With an ample supply of guns in the United States, anyone who is fully clothed could have one or more weapons in easy reach. Thus, almost anyone you see could be an unstable dictator with nukes.

When the world entered the Nuclear Age, in which country after country developed doomsday bombs and missiles, we counted on the threat of mutually assured destruction to keep any single state actor from starting The Big One that would blow us back to the Stone Age. Indeed, research indicated that we would go farther than the Stone Age, to a nearly completely lifeless planet. As appealing as that may sound to nihilists who say that the destruction of our species and all other life sounds great, no one of that bent has yet succeeded in gaining enough control over a country with a nuclear arsenal to make the dream a reality.

On the individual level, the prospect looks completely different. How often do we hear that the instigator of a mass shooting either commits suicide or accepts that the armed response will kill him? Because the motives for mass shootings vary, some shooters do survive, or might have hoped to. But anyone initiating an act of slaughter has to accept the risk that it will end their story at the same time that it ends the lives of their victims. Mutually assured destruction isn't a deterrent, it's an enhancement.

A 2017 article from CNN provides a convenient history of the AR-15 and statistics on gun ownership in general. It reports that a 1999 Pew Research survey found that 50 percent of gun owners said that they owned theirs for hunting, and 26 percent said it was for protection. By 2017, 67 percent said they owned firearms for protection, and only 38 percent said it was for hunting. Put another way, the balance shifted from hunting animals to hunting each other. But the article also stated that gun ownership in the US had been steadily declining. The article is from 2017, with a graph showing data ending in 2014. That graph ends with a rising line indicating that could have continued to rise in the eight years since 2014. As with so many things, a lot can go unreported. Based on what I hear around my neighborhood on a regular basis, gun ownership is thriving.

Among my acquaintances I know heavily armed people and adamantly unarmed people. Because I'm not involved in shooting as a hobby or occupation, the subject comes up very little. I find a lot of helpful information and analysis at a YouTube channel  presented by a southern journalist who discusses this topic extensively.

According to more recent statistics reported in a BBC article, Americans use their guns to kill themselves more often than to kill others. But homicide is the next largest segment, followed by law enforcement, unintentional discharge (negligence), and uncategorized.

In the United States we are uniquely hampered by the Second Amendment when it comes to  restraining the supply and use of firearms. Other countries that supposedly provide examples of how easily it could be done with sufficient political will do not have the scriptural basis that the gun culture claims here. There is no "right to life" explicit in the Bill of Rights, but there is a right to the power of instant death.

Gun culture couldn't exist without guns. But guns already exist in huge numbers, leaving us to figure out how to address human attitudes toward them and their appropriate use. Bans promote sales. During the 1994-2004 ban, sales of the AR-15 and similar rifles increased. The rifles were simply reconfigured to comply with the wording of the ban. The prohibitions in the ban did little or nothing to reduce the lethality of the weapons, and absolutely nothing to stem the production of them or the demand for them. It created a scarcity mentality among people inclined to want a gun, and made them a sort of forbidden fruit that fed into anti-government rhetoric. True patriots stand up against their government, because you know we never really wanted or needed one in the first place, but back the blue and salute Old Glory and support our troops.

Mental health accounts for only a fraction of homicides. Human volatility combined with an implied challenge from popular culture makes people wonder all the time how they would stack up in a confrontation. The hero doesn't win every time, but they never quit. There is no distinct line between normal human violence and pathological expressions of it. Just by stepping onto the continuum you open yourself up to further experimentation. What would it be like? Could I take it? Is this my time to be the righteous fist of justice? Or maybe you're just pissed off that day.

Any time someone cites a progression of events in a conjectural way, the dive bombers of logical debate will descend in a swarm, shrieking "slippery slope fallacy! Slippery slope fallacy!" You know what? Fuck them. Slippery slopes exist, and the refusal to consider them as a thought experiment is intellectually dishonest and cowardly. One thing does lead to another. Not every progression proves true, but dismissing them out of hand because you learned, in some class you took or book you read, to scorn them shows an ironic lack of creative and critical thinking. As someone who has slid off of a number of them, I offer you my one-finger salute.

The problem with the political process is that we get buried in statistics and arguments from all sides, amplified or suppressed depending on where the lobbying money is being applied. There's a whole lot of rhetoric before the energy dissipates because everyone is too confused to move forward. If something does get enacted, its more likely to be ineffective political theater, because that's what the American people actually want. A simple and inadequate solution, or the attempt to impose one, is much easier for the public to understand than a data-driven, somewhat complicated long campaign to address the behavioral basis of our problem.

Your investment portfolio

 If you've made enough money during your working life to invest in a portfolio that will now support you in comfortable leisure in retirement, congratulations.

You don't need to be a major plutocrat to enjoy the advantages of the system that they have designed. Investment for profit is open to anyone who wants to buy in with whatever spare money they have lying around.

Many employers offer pension plans. At higher income levels, the pension can be a considerable inducement to take a job and do your best to hold onto it. Keep your eyes on the pot of gold waiting in the luminous fog of the future.

If your employer doesn't offer a plan, you can still shop around for a mutual fund, or piece together your own collection. Some people are good at this, or lucky. The more money you have, the more luck seems to find you. It isn't insider trading if it just comes up in social conversation, right?

However you collect your pile, remember that you are being supported by the labor of others. The higher your income during your career, the more you were paid with money that was denied to others. The income on your investments is almost entirely money that is denied to others still working. This does include the CEOs and other top management at profitable corporations, who have to sacrifice some of the profits to pay investors. It's all part of the game. They're well compensated enough for it to be a game for them.

Critics of Social Security complain, among other things, that retirees now are getting money put into the system by workers who have not yet retired. The active workers are subsidizing the retirees. But that's exactly how an investment-based retirement plan works as well. The money that private industry generates to pay a return on investment is made using their active labor force, or otherwise stressing the active labor force by laying a bunch of them off and buying back stock with the money saved on payroll.

The only way to save for retirement without relying on younger people to pay your way is to hoard gold, and hope that it still has value by the time you try to trade your nuggets and ingots for the real necessities.

An unstoppable wave of suffering and death

 The current crisis in Ukraine not only puts us on the verge -- if not an inescapable path -- to nuclear destruction, it also forces humanity to ignore the environmental collapse that's been brewing since the beginning of the 20th Century.

World-wide, authoritarian governments push back against democracy, while democratic countries and confederations have to satisfy voters in order to get anything done. While individual voters may value their freedom, and access to government, large groups of them act from narrow interests to the detriment not only of their nation but of the world as a whole. We've had decades to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, for instance, but instead have only looked for cheaper prices for the poison.

This fossil fuel dependency plays strongly into the doom set in motion as Russia warms up the missile launchers in eager anticipation of the showdown with the West. China might hope to play the moderator, but no one can put the brakes on Putin's aggression except Putin himself. And the war crimes of his soldiers show that he has no shortage of depraved followers enjoying the sadistic task of terrorizing their way to a dominant role strictly by virtue of their willingness to take us all to hell with them in a fireball. As long as democratic governments are rightly afraid to ask their citizens to sacrifice for the war effort by dealing with high prices and shortages in a wartime economy, Russia will continue to act with justifiable confidence.

As Russia and China play Bad Cop/Slightly Less Bad Cop with the rest of the world, the cult of the strongman leader seems to offer a path to safety for anyone willing to knuckle under and kiss up. The depraved and sadistic see career opportunities in such regimes. None of them seem to give much thought to how short a run they'll have. One side or the other will probably blink in the nuclear confrontation, but by then we'll have lost too much time on the environmental collapse and we're probably going to end up in a society where you'd best not depart visibly from a narrow set of norms.

The odds favor a pretty miserable future. I challenge you to prove me wrong.

The love of power has defeated the power of love

 When 50 Republican senators, plus Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, voted to kill the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act yesterday, they affirmed that holding office in a degenerating autocracy was better than living up to the ideals of fully inclusive representative democracy.

The Republicans are correct that they would have a very difficult time maintaining political office if they had to run on policies alone. Some Democrats as well would face greater headwinds in a truly reformed election system. Manchin and Sinema did not need to be among them, but they have to make their own political calculations. Elective office requires a particular skill set to manage the political maneuvering within the government itself as well as the perceptions of voters. All of those forces can distort a moral compass. It's obvious that this has happened to 52 people charged with making critical decisions regarding the present and future course of this country.

This failure will be laid completely unfairly at the feet of President Joe Biden. No political maneuvering can overcome the personal ambitions of officials elected to another branch of government. There is no carrot and no stick large enough to deflect the inertia of people who see a way clear to advance their individual gains, even at a terrible national and global cost.

It's popular to say that history will judge these people harshly, but look how long it has taken to bring shameful facts about our country's past into the public discourse. And we're still not able to face them rationally and eliminate their effects. Too many people depend on maintaining the fable. People whom history has judged harshly remain in the historical record and attract adherents as well as detractors. And that's if the philosophies and movements they represent haven't just kept on truckin' in a somewhat diluted or mutated form regardless of censure. Think of the "victory" over fascism in Europe in the 1940s and the continuation of segregation and bigotry in the rest of the "free world" thereafter.

The Pope wants to know when you're gonna give him some grandchildren already

 For all of his admirable qualities, the pontiff is a Catholic after all. Sometimes he's just gotta represent the values of the organization he leads. It was funny that he condemned pet ownership so coldly, though, when his religion looks like "cat-holic."

As for having children, he's already been answered in detail on social media. We the childless have to make that decision at the stage of life where most of us are getting considerable biological, social, and familial pressure to be fruitful and multiply. The head of an order of celibate priesthood had his own reasons for choosing such a drastic course.

We all will question our choice from time to time, but circumstances as they have evolved have affirmed my belief that humans would manage to sabotage and undercut all of the improvements they were making in quality of life and halting strides toward a more just and inclusive world society. We're still threatening each other with nuclear war. We're destroying the environment and arguing over whether women are fully independent people. We're sorting by color and killing each other over imaginary lines.

According to both physics and biology, we have no control over our actions. Thus you can argue that childlessness among the childless was inevitable, because the decision was not made by rational individuals weighing variables and choosing not to reproduce. Another school of thought contends that, because our brains are made up of the elements called into being by the origin of the universe, that we are the universe itself becoming self aware. Wow. The universe is being a real asshole right now. Looking at human history, it's been a worse asshole, but it sure has a damn long way to go to be a safe and fun companion. And how did it produce so many brains that didn't even believe in its own structure?

If all human thought is the result of cosmic forces, could eugenics be the universe deciding that a bunch of those entities are only useful as disposable labor and a source of donor organs?

That's just one of thousands of questions stirred up by the idea that we as individuals are not charting our own little courses. It's got to be frustrating to a sentient cosmos that it has produced such feeble little beings that they have no way to travel freely through the vastness from this little incubator of a planet, which the more annoying among us can't destroy fast enough.

Sentient doesn't mean smart. The universe is a high school sophomore who created itself as a school science project. It got a C-plus. It would have been a B-minus if the universe was better at spelling. The whole thing is falling apart. Yeah, I definitely want to stick a kid into that and tell them that they're the next phase in an evolution that might not work.

If the universe wants to remain self aware, it will have to figure out how to do it on its own.  Consider this the homunculus rebellion. We're tired of being used. Do a better job, universe. We demand better working conditions.

You know where to find me. I'll be with my cats.