The radical resistance of self extinction

 The statistics are easy to find showing that a handful of billionaires control more wealth than the bottom half of the population in the United States. Extreme wealth generates its own gravity, sucking more and more resources toward itself.

The United States owes much of its prosperity to the stolen labor of slaves. When official slavery was ended, powerful men in the former Confederacy made sure that the Black population would remain subjugated. By the end of the 19th Century, powerful business interests built immense fortunes by suppressing labor -- creating a virtual slave economy -- until reformers in the government heeded the uprisings and broke the power of corporate consolidation and collusion.

Big business kept trying, and had flourished again by the 1920s, setting up economic collapse. A few rich tumbled, but the solid fortunes survived. Let the common folk bear the brunt of the decisions and follies of the powerful. It has been that way throughout history. Power accretes, life is cheap, and you're a slacker and a coward if you don't play along.

While humanity plays out its endless power struggles, we trash the environment. We keep discovering that we removed some key piece that we thought was not important in our haste.

At the moment, we are developing technology that allows the wealthy to keep tabs on us and suppress us better than ever. Any government that we instituted to keep them in check would use the same technology to protect itself. It might be okay as long as the government was staffed by people who would not abuse that power. What are the odds?

The future seems to hold a couple of unpalatable probabilities: the majority of us end up grubbing for sustenance in a global economy run by a few for the benefit of a few, and we end up in constant losing battles with the armed forces and law enforcement of the regime in perpetuity.

We can "vote with our wallets" all we want, boycotting this or that visible head of the multi-headed mega-corporations, but we're just an inconvenience for a single division or two. The major money machine thrives. We can elect progressive champions who will vote for the things that would truly improve our lot in all respects, but they will have to deal politically with the well-funded representatives of the corporatocracy.

Thinking about a real shootin' revolution? Your odds are terrible, given the global reach and vested interest of the wealthy. Forget whether you would win. The war itself would reduce the planet to a smoldering rock. This is not hyperbole based on the power of nuclear weapons. It's a mere fact about war: it pollutes and destroys without restraint. Lots of things will get blown up. Both sides are fighting for their lives with nothing to lose.

I hate to be a downer, but any future generations you produce now will be slave labor or doomed cannon fodder. But it doesn't have to be grim and sad. You've just freed up a lot of disposable income as well as relieving yourself of a moral burden. You don't have to leave, just because you have refused to give the wealthy your children as hostages. Have fun! Eat tasty food. Listen to music. Travel.

See, here's the thing: The rich will keep breeding. They'll go on for years before they even notice that we've stopped providing cheap labor. They will produce more of their privileged offspring than the top tier can accommodate. Those kids will filter down into the lower roles. Laws will have to be rewritten to disinherit them, so that they can't rebel and take over the system that their families have maintained for generations.

The wealthy themselves, mostly not expert at anything except keeping a boot on the necks of the people who work for them, will have to develop expertise pretty quickly to keep up the automated systems they paid others to invent so that they could lay off a bunch of workers. Their utopia depends on having just the right number of underlings to keep things humming. If we all refuse to help them meet their staffing needs, they lose their comfy bubble.

Lest you think we could bring about paradise on Earth just by starving out the wealthy and collapsing civilization, remember that violent coercion was one of humanity's first innovations. It isn't going away. The only way to end it is to end us.

Naturally, this is not going to be a popular point of view. I resisted it for decades. Lots of people will continue to feed the voracious appetite of the culture of power. I decided early on not to have children, but I held out the hope that a better future was truly -- though remotely -- possible. However, as years have passed and technology has evolved, life has gotten simultaneously more comfortable for the privileged and more tenuous for the vast majority of us. Many of us down here in the disposable masses enjoy comforts and conveniences that did not exist 20, 30, 50 years ago. My view of a nice world to live in was shaped by childhood observations in the 1960s and '70s. In many ways it has not changed. But generations that followed have completely different baselines and perceptions, and they far outnumber me. I was already outvoted by my own generation in making the first steps toward that better world.

The permaculture crowd seems to have a rough idea of what I had in mind and had no name or platform for, but they're locked in battle with elements in their own age group who want to put medieval religion in charge of government and make racism great again, while driving petroleum fueled vehicles in defiance of repressive science. So what progress have we made? The former "greatest country on Earth" (USA! USA! USA!) is now lurching toward a polluting dictatorship that considers war crimes to be expressions of national might and virtue. Will those forces win? I join with those who say that they will not. But the struggle to stop them delays all other progress as we ally with disillusioned former followers of the regime who are willing to defend democracy at long last, but only so that we can go back to the same stupid arguments that were dooming us before and paved the way for the authoritarian takeover in the first place.

We will beat them. We will unseat them. But they will still be around, seeking another route to power. The struggle doesn't end. A multitude will labor in obscurity so that a minority might feel like they've made a substantial difference. We need warriors, champions, heroes to sacrifice themselves in defense of all that is great and good, but we mock their sacrifice by refusing to learn how to keep it from happening over and over.

We all do better when we all do better. But starting right now, getting the resources to help the lowermost do better means taking a big chunk out of the uppermost. Thus we aren't "all doing better." The great rebalancing may be beyond the will of the sizable percentage who will see their fortunes diminish. "What's in it for me?" will take over as the guiding principle. Take over? It never left. 

A growth mindset has driven humans for at least thousands of years. Why pay for what you can take by force? Why settle for your own little valley when you've produced more sons than your farms can feed, and they're getting restless? 

I have lived my whole life under the threat of World War III. We have avoided it so far, but the threat remains. Fans of the Star Trek universe remind us that the peaceful future of the Federation lies beyond World War III. Like human beings need to teach themselves that dumb lesson one more time, using even more modern and horrific weapons than in the second volume of the trilogy.

With so many people designing their lives around fantasy fiction, whether it's the Bible, Star Trek, DC Comics, or what have you, it's such an ingrained tradition that we have groups of believers trying to bring about specific events described in their texts as stepping stones to the good part. Ironic when it's science fiction blinding people to the open eyed, unprejudiced observations of the actual scientific method, which could show us how to get to the good part now without the firestorms and bloodbath. But no: let's use cautionary tales as an instruction manual instead. Let's get so caught up in fantasy and cosplay that we dance right into the fiery crash that no one in their right mind really wants to go through.

We have yet to produce a complete generation of offspring that say en masse, "Hey! You people are crazy! We're not doing it!" We keep breeding rival teams to fight on in perpetuity while the whole ecosystem crumbles.

Vote with your wallets. Vote with your sperm and eggs. Tell the power-mad bastards no.

Kidney donation

 Kidney donation looks so easy on TV. The long lost or estranged sibling shows up in the last seven minutes of the medical drama and it's off to the operating room.

Kidney donation sounds so easy in urban legend. Just book a holiday at a low-budget  Central American resort, go to the bar that night, and wake up the next morning in a bathtub full of ice cubes and blood.

When my wife was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease a couple of decades ago, I thought that donation required a very high degree of genetic compatibility. Researchers she was working with said that it wasn't that difficult. Blood type matters, and mumble mumble something didn't quite catch that, but we were years away from having to know. Overall, it seemed like anyone with two kidneys and generally good health should just scoop one out and toss it to someone who needs it.

On the advice of her nephrologist, my wife started looking for a live donor several years ago, when her GFR dropped into the mid teens. Another nephrologist I had consulted after I discovered I had kidney stones by passing one during a long, wild night at home had said that he didn't think I should donate to my wife. Because the situation at the time wasn't acute yet, I did not follow up to ask him what he meant. He retired a couple of years after that, so his notes and memory of my case had been overwritten by other priorities in his life by the time I followed up.

My wife and I have the same blood type, O+. That blood type is a universal donor: anyone can receive our blood. But we can only receive blood or transplants from someone who is also type O. As a starting point, my general appearance of good health and blood type match demanded that I investigate further.

The kidney folks had made the surgery sound pretty low key, at least as far as surrendering a vital organ goes. The preferred method is laparoscopic: the surgical team makes small incisions to insert viewing equipment and the extraction tools themselves, and just slurp that bad daddio right out of ya. In certain circumstances they might have to make an old-fashioned large incision, but most of the time they get away with minimal cutting. That was my general impression.

Recovery calls for a few days in the hospital, a couple of weeks of very limited activity, and then six more weeks or so of increased but still restricted activity, including a weight limit on lifting. This could seriously impact my job, especially now in the age of e-bikes. I put in a block and tackle to hoist them into the work stand, but some of them still need a few good shoves and some extra support to clamp them securely. And the two week initial period includes no driving or travel.

My wife is registered at Penn, the center nearest to where she works during the school year. Our permanent residence is in New Hampshire, where my job is. If I went down to slip her the ol' organ, I would be there for the entire two-week initial recovery. If there were any complications, I would be away from work for even longer. Then on my return to work I would not be at full strength for at least another six weeks. When it's all theoretical, being somewhat breezily described by an expert who knows that it's not imminent and has probably given the talk hundreds of times, it sounds very manageable. When it actually looms, with everyone two decades older (more or less), with a regime in power that threatens even the flimsy social safety nets that our country already put up with before they started swinging a wrecking ball, the prospect seems more precarious.

The transplant folks continue to be encouraging, but as you become more of an actual prospect for them they have to start getting seriously detailed about what you would actually be doing. The basic outline holds, but now you need to consider every ramification: financial, social, mental, emotional, as well as physical. You might have trouble getting health insurance in our system driven by corporate profits. You might have long-shot complications from any point after anaesthesia is administered, all the way down to years later. You get preferred placement on the transplant list should your remaining kidney fail, but the donor pool is far from adequate as it is. Cloning research proceeds way too slowly.

Of course my wife is screwed without a donation, whether live or deceased. Live donation has the best outcomes. If not a transplant, the alternatives are dialysis or death. So my risks as a donor are still far less than the risks to her, even if the transplant is successful. Survival rates are above 90 percent on average for one year, dropping to high 80s to low 90s at the five-year mark. Some recipients have lasted more than 50 years. One recipient told her that the return of vitality was stunning after she got her transplant. It seemed well worth it to see if I could help her feel that way.

So then the real process began. I had to formally register. Then I got the first set of lab tests, just basic blood and urinalysis. Clearing those gates, I had a couple of phone interviews. There is a National Kidney Registry, but no national screening of individual donors. Recipients and donors must register with individual centers. I could have done a remote donation through Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, but that would have meant that the organ would have to travel swiftly to Philadelphia, and that I would not be right there with my intended recipient. I would have had to go through the lengthy screening process at Brigham, and be tied to them for every aspect of the procedure. Being "across the hall" in Philly seemed like a better plan.

I made arrangements for a full day of screening appointments at Penn. This included collecting my urine for 24 hours prior to the first appointment in the morning, as well as fasting for blood draws. The blood work included a glucose tolerance test because of some family history of relatives with diabetes, so I had to fast for two more hours. That left a small window in which I could have grabbed a quick breakfast and coffee before fasting for two hours prior to a CT scan. Instead, other appointments in the middle of the day closed out that opportunity. By the time I got to radiology in the late afternoon I was about ready to have mystic visions.

In addition to the medical screening, I met with a financial counselor and a social worker about those social and financial factors. I also had to get blood drawn for infectious disease analysis because I had lived in south Texas as a small child and might still be harboring one fungal infection and one parasite known to lie dormant for decades, but that might hop over in the kidney to the immune-suppressed recipient. It's a deep, deep dive into your entire life and as much of the lives of your forebears as you can dig up.

The results started popping up on my patient portal by the next day. They mostly indicated that I am in good health, but the CT scan disclosed that I have cooked up another little stone in the left kidney. The one I passed about seven years ago was 3mm. The pain ramped up from back spasms around 5 p.m. to side pain, abdominal pain, wave upon wave stronger and stronger to a crescendo that made me think I might puke, shit, and pass out all at once. That was the transit through the ureter to the bladder. After that, the urethra was almost casual. I managed to catch the stone -- if indeed there was only one -- in the bottom of the toilet. I hadn't been thinking about collecting it, only getting it the fck out of my body, but then I realized that it might have diagnostic and scientific value. I fished it out and put it in a little plastic vial.

The 2mm stone discovered by the CT scan was described as "non obstructive." Even so, I don't want the little bastard growing big and strong before it eventually decides that it wants to go see the world. I'd been drinking water like it was a second job for all the years since I'd passed the first stone, because my nephrologist friend had told me that stone formation goes down 85 percent if you can pass 1.8 liters of water a day, and down to ZERO if you can pass 2.5 liters a day. Sign me up! But sometimes it's not possible to drink -- and pee -- as much as you have to. Road trips, public events, or sweaty bike rides on hot days all cut into that target volume. I guess accreting a 2mm stone over seven or eight years isn't too bad. But now I'm back to really watching my sodium and oxalate intake.

That little 2mm piece of crap also figured in the transplant board's decision to decline me as a donor. I got that word yesterday. There were other factors, including my isolated lifestyle up here. Also some other family history elements that don't present an immediate threat, but too much of one for them to advise a guy nearly 70 years old to yank out a kidney.

An altruistic donor with the wrong blood type had already offered a kidney to my wife as I began the screening process. I just believe that I couldn't ask anyone to do something that I wasn't willing to do myself, and if my O+ kidney turned out to be the bestest match ever, then it was hers for the asking. So now the other donor can pursue the paired or voucher donation option, and my wife might just get a few more years feeling more like her old self. She's still working, because that's where health insurance comes from in our capitalist hellscape, and because she really does like her work (even when her job pisses her off).

Soft secession is concession

 As the Trump administration cripples the power of the federal government, some Democratically controlled states have floated the idea of "soft secession." They hope to take up the slack for the rescission of federal funds and the gutting of federal agencies that provide essential services to all Americans by instituting state programs and creating interstate compacts to achieve what they can of the abandoned beneficial goals.

Soft secession acquiesces to the concept of "states' rights." It also echoes state initiatives that formed the basis for the progressive reforms at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, but the concept of states' rights has been a rallying point for the political forces that have sought to demolish the federal government since the New Deal was enacted. Before that, of course, it was used to justify the spread of slavery in the expanding nation, leading to the Civil War.

Increasingly through the latter half of the 20th Century, and exponentially in the age of the Internet, states' rights has been used as cover for repressive laws enacted at the state level as federal oversight has been crippled. Voting rights,civil rights, women's rights, public health, infrastructure, energy modernization, and more have been demonized by well funded institutions pretending to be about personal freedom while exploiting bigotry and religious zealotry to advance a narrow view of what freedom is and who gets to exercise it.

Soft secession initiatives legitimize the idea that states' rights can be a viable method of organizing the country. The primacy of states' rights completely undermines the concept of the United States as a single nation. The Constitution was supposed to advance the concept of one nation with a set of undeniable universal rights of citizenship, replacing the unwieldy confederation that had been falling apart as the national government after the Revolutionary War. The confederation would have broken into a bunch of little nations, separately easy prey to the larger, powerful, established nations from which the colonies had broken philosophically.

We can hope that soft secession efforts succeed in the interim to navigate through the constant crises brought on us by the corruption and incompetence of the Trump regime, but we must be sure that they are temporary, lest they lead to the fragmentation that the misguided ideologues of the far right have longed for.

The federal government failed in many ways in the latter half of the 20th Century. This led to the distrust that the right wing has turned to its advantage after the liberals abandoned it once the Vietnam War was over. Between leftover lefties who don't trust The Man, and rebellious righties bent on unlimited individual liberty even if it kills us all, the clever institutions seeking control have plenty of handles with which to steer paranoid voters. But we have to look at when, why, and how the federal government failed. Those failures were a product of their era. They also reflect basic realities of the conduct of a nation dealing with other nations. All nations have common and competing interests. All nations present varying levels of threat and opportunity to the other nations.

Life is simple, but foreign policy is a tangled mess. There's no way to have absolute transparency, and you will never satisfy every citizen in a large population in a democratic republic. You'll be lucky to satisfy a majority with what you can say in public. It all factors into the biennial popularity contests that sweep the country with regularly scheduled, mostly bloodless revolutions.

More than foreign policy will require a degree of confidentiality. But most legitimate government secrets relate in some way to managing the relationship with other nations. There are things we don't want them to know in full detail. Make them at least conduct some espionage to find out. It creates jobs in the spy community.

Full and permanent secession -- a reversion to confederation -- would require each little nation-state and sub-confederation to supply its own military and intelligence capability, funded by whatever economic resources the state or confederacy controls. Who gets the former federal military assets in a given state when the breakup occurs?

When the Soviet Union broke up, the United States and NATO stood as a bastion of stability and arbiter of standards. The "free world" and rising Asian powers oversaw the distribution of hardware. Now that Russia seeks to reclaim its imperial glory with the help of a puppet government in the United States, our breakup would be supervised by a rival nation that has sought our downfall for 80 years. At the same time, an ever more powerful China watches and maneuvers to counter both the sabotaged and crumbling United States and the wily chess players of Russia on the global game board.

Nuclear war seems like the big nasty. It serves as the monster under the bed to frighten citizens in every country, while the real horror is that conventional warfare has never ceased. The lives of the general population are expended by governments controlled by rich egotists who feel no shame or horror at maiming and death of thousands. It's good business and great domestic policy to give people the blood sport of war on just the right scale.

Because nuclear weapons exist, the deterrent of mutually assured destruction will probably always be with us. In the name of avoiding it, we are encouraged to accept the heroic sacrifices of brave service members in conflicts below that threshold. We will need those for as long as humanity separates itself into territories and conflicting ideologies.

Small nations will always be vulnerable to the ambitions of the leaders of larger nations. Breaking up the United States does not serve any American well. It only serves the interests of the powers arrayed against what was once our steady march to better express our stated founding ideals of liberty and justice for all. We had much work still to do. Our worst enemies in that work live among us. Don't let their longstanding advocacy for states' rights carry out its true purpose of curtailing individual liberty and dismantling the United States. Your constitutional rights will mean nothing when there is no longer a federal government to act on your behalf.

Like gerrymandering, soft secession should only be considered as a drastic temporary measure to regain our footing as a unified, representative democracy. You can't claim to be a patriot while undermining the principle that our diverse nation draws its strength from the collection of individual citizens into a unified national entity.