United States unleashes the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

 Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The United States has become the harbinger of death, the agent of suffering and evil across the globe. Trump voters must be so proud.

We invite disease back into our own country through anti-vaccine bullshit. We facilitate its spread in the world by cutting funding for AIDS treatment and withdrawing funding from medical research.

We allow our Defense Department to strut and pose, and drop expensive bombs on regions already volatile, where the detonations will not quell the anger that dwells there. Tough guy rhetoric from the television host who was hired to portray the Secretary of Defense reinforces the bombast from the reality television character portraying the President.

The cruel tyrant, aided by greedy billionaires, cut foreign aid, throwing millions of people, including children, into deeper poverty and the certainty of famine.

This regime is centered on death. Its supporters pride themselves on their cruelty toward the people they deem inferior, in their own eyes and in the eyes of their god.  They detain and deport children with cancer, cutting them off from their treatment Everything they do is geared toward the destruction of millions, billions of people, so that the survivors can have lebensraum. They don't have allies. They have enemies and subordinates. They don't have a vision of shared humanity, they have a dream of monoculture enforced by conquest.

Would-be conquerors have had thousands of years to try to make it work. Their efforts have always ended in a tide line of dried blood where they crested and fell back, or simply dried up in place. The story of empire is ultimately one tragic failure after another. From the mid 20th Century, super power has only been held through the threat of murder suicide. It's a global abusive relationship.

The United States had a chance to be something different. There was a lot wrong in our past, but some of us were trying to make it right as best we could. Instead, the current party in power wants to return to the wrong and intensify it. Choose your world.

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.

Make the world safe for safety

Eons ago, when everyone lived at more or less the same level, conflict based on control of resources and territory was a more or less animal thing, augmented gradually with various hand tools that might give one side a temporary advantage until their opponents figured out something equal or superior with which to retaliate. But, no matter who won, the big enemies were still famine and disease.

As technology advanced, unevenly, it made all aspects of life easier in places that possessed it, so that those cultures expanded more readily, dominating less technologically advanced cultures regardless of the ethics and morals of a given invasion. Technologically dominant powers probably inhibited the advancement of cultures they dominated. The evolutionary compulsion to advance tribal interest evolved into national interest, and imperialism. It was still the same basic urge that had inspired some hominid in a snit to pick up a rock or a jawbone and bust an adversary's head.

All the way up to World War I, disease still killed more warriors than actual battle did. Then improving medicine and killing hardware shifted the balance in war so that combatants could finally claim the higher score.

Setting aside mass slaughter for a moment, early hominids and primitive humans faced risk constantly. Risk takers served as test pilots for the species, advancing the frontiers of capability or providing grim lessons in what not to do. Our respect for risk takers probably predates language. But so does our eye-rolling amusement at generations of Darwin Award finalists, from long before Charlie D walked the Earth.

We can't control or predict earthquakes. We can observe hurricanes and predict their approximate course a few days in advance. We can home in on outbreaks of disease and try to contain their spread or develop vaccines. With eyes in the sky, we can give a few minutes' warning of tornados. We can advise people how to drive safely, and to avoid lifestyle habits linked to disease. But we can't predict exactly when someone will snap and start shooting, or when a nation will lose its grip on global citizenship and start a war inside or outside its own borders. You can say roughly, observing trends and monitoring communications, that a nation presents a risk. On an interpersonal level, you can sometimes tell -- or at least guess -- that someone is volatile.

This unpredictability in human behavior, combined with the long heritage of risk, gives our species a paradoxical yearning for safety and an unwillingness to commit to being safe. Most of us like to be able to move around without constant vigilance. For most of my life, this country seemed like a place like that. Of course I wasn't black, or an unaccompanied woman, and I never ventured into a bad neighborhood. Stuff happened, but it didn't seem as common as it does today.

Personal violence and institutional violence are the micro and the macro of humanity's danger to humanity. Our disdain for the natural world may manage to take us out before we dissolve into global combat. Or we might dodge the bullets both metaphorical and actual, and get our shit together. But the biggest threat to our safety is our belief that safety is impossible. We can't be sure that enough people -- maybe even all people -- could ever be willing to live and let live. We are not yet "all in this together."

With the technology at our command, there is no good excuse for human suffering. We have fear and anger in the world because we accept it.

All that is required for good to prevail is for bad people to do nothing. Focus on a common good that stems from energy and willingness to work, decoupled from grasping material ambition. Hold your temper. Disconnect your jealousy. Evolution beyond the weaponization of technology will require a level of conscious thought. It may prove impossible. Utopianists in a hurry will try to slap together a rule book full of begged questions that they understand intuitively, but vulnerable to interpretation.

To begin the process at all will require a general consensus that we will quit hurting each other. That one step has tripped us up for thousands of years. Rather than reach the point at which appreciative existence becomes our mission, we endure the constant clash between dark and light, the good people and the bad people doing things in opposition. If that's what we're stuck with, there's really no point in going on.