So you might guess that I didn’t like the movie. I did like it, but I also didn’t. I think it was a great 20-minute story that dragged on for two and half hours of mano a mano slug-fest. It was an incredibly noisy movie, visually and audibly. And I didn’t care for the score, at least on first hearing: I didn’t even stay through the credits.

This is Christopher Nolan’s dark re-imagining of the Man of Steel, much like the re-imagined Batman of his Dark Knight series. It’s a first step toward trying to put some real motivation behind a guy who wears tights and a cape and can’t be touched by bullets. Given the incredible basic premise, it isn’t a half-bad attempt.

Kal-El (Superman’s Kryptonian name) is born on a planet collapsing from extractive resource depletion, genetic reprogramming of the race, and war. The war part is very odd, because there doesn’t seem to be anyone the Kryptonians are at war with. Nor is there any indication that they’ve even met any other intelligent races in their attempts to colonize the galaxy. They’re all alone out there in the big, harsh, empty universe with its wretched, stony, poison-wreathed rocks for the Kryptonian colonies to die on, weapons in hand, apparently screaming in rage at the sheer emptiness of it all. Nonetheless, they have their Supreme Commander, General Zod, a fleet of dreadnoughts large enough to take on the Death Star, ceremonial armor, deadly hand-weapons, and imposing, militaristic, decadent architectural monstrosities straight out of a Geiger painting.

In an extremely noisy escape from dreadnoughts commanded by General Zod while mounted on a giant, leathery dragonfly, Kal-El’s father, Jor-El, manages to steal the entire genetic database for Krypton, beam it into his newborn son’s genetic structure, slap him into an infant-sized escape pod, and launch it toward the Earth. Huzzah.

We see Kal-El’s childhood on Earth as Clark Kent through flashbacks throughout the movie. Those flashbacks are the only interesting and touching parts of the whole 150 minute film. Comic book heroes have always appealed to adolescents — that’s who pays for them, after all — particularly their sense of alienation: the X-Men, Spiderman, the Hulk, the Batman. This movie explores Superman’s alienation pretty well — a sweet kid with good instincts who really, really, really doesn’t fit in. Like the day at school that his X-Ray Vision kicks in, and he panics and locks himself in a closet. Weirdo, the kids say. What’s wrong with him? He saves a school bus full of kids that drives off a bridge into the water, and the parents of the children he saves are terrified, though they can’t quite believe what their kids have told them. Weirdo, they say. What’s wrong with him?

His adoptive Earth-father, Jonathan Kent, is no easier on him. This is not the kindly Glenn Ford of the 1978 Superman, dealing out folksy Kansas platitudes and blue skies of endless optimism. Kevan Costner comes across as a real product of the 1950′s midwest — stern, hard-edged, distant, a little afraid of his son, and a whole lot afraid for him. It’s a bitter lesson he teaches Clark — stay hidden. Otherwise, people will hate you. They’ll try to kill you. So thorough is this indoctrination that Clark lets his father die in a tornado rather than reveal his powers.

That’s enough to mess you up for life.

So we first meet the adult Clark as a drifter, kicking around fishing boats and oil rigs, blending in as best he can and moving on when he’s forced by his strange sense of honor to save people from industrial disasters of their own making, like the oil-rig fire we see in the previews, where he stands like Atlas under a world of flaming steel.

It’s this compulsion to help the people of Earth that makes this Superman an enigma. He has no reason to love humans — just the two that raised him, and frankly more his mom than his dad. Weirdo, they all say. What’s wrong with you? Yet compelled to help, he certainly is. He doesn’t seem to understand it any better than we do, and that’s what makes this work. There’s no real reason for it, and no apology. It’s just a fixed constant in his character, like Batman’s fear of cowardice and impotence that drives his endless thirst for revenge.

We’ll breeze right by how the drifter Clark just happens to be handling bags for Lois Lane at a super-top-secret military dig in the arctic where they’ve found a spaceship under 20,000 years of ice. Of course, the spaceship is Kryptonian, sent out as an automated seed probe some 20,000 years ago, only to crash on Earth and get buried in ice (it was apparently piloted by a Kryptonian version of Microsoft Windows). Clark carries a little key-fob with him from his escape pod that turns out to be the Universal Ignition Key for all Kryptonian seedships, dreadnoughts, and computer systems; it also contains the stored Mind of Jor-El, his Kryptonian father. He discovers this, of course, when he uses his heat vision to bore through the ice, enters the ship, and puts the key in the ignition.

Starting up the seed ship causes it to phone home (a Kryptonian version of the iPhone), which call is intercepted by none other than General Zod, who has survived the destruction of Krypton because he was chilling in the Phantom Zone, a rather nasty form of solitary confinement to which he and his minions had been sentenced for their abortive attempt to take over Krypton during the little fracas with Jor-El. Krypton’s destruction frees them all, and they spend a couple of decades cobbling up a star drive and scavenging hardware before the unexpected call.

So Zod comes to Earth. He wants the Kryptonian genetic database to bring back his people, and he doesn’t care what he has to do to get it. Meanwhile, Kal-El has had a long father-son chat with the holographic projection of Jor-El, and now he Knows Who He Is. And why he’s on Earth. And how to fly, and not dig a canyon-sized divot when he lands, and how to cook a perfect three-minute egg with his heat vision without making it explode.

From there, the story descends into a very noisy CG slug-fest as Superman takes on Zod and his minions. He wins, of course, by virtue of his ability to grit his teeth and fly into a gravity-beam that’s ripping the Earth apart. I’ve never understood why gritting your teeth and making fists helps you fly better, or hit harder, or think faster. But apparently it is the key ingredient that allows the hero to overcome pretty much anything. Remember that the next time you’re puzzling over a test question. Grit teeth. Make fists.

Zod and his minions are sent back into a black hole, Superman is now out of the closet, and Clark Kent dons his glasses and joins the staff of the Daily Planet. Happy ending. Huzzah.

—-

There are several things I did find interesting about this re-imagining.

I grew up on the Superman of the 1960′s and early 1970′s, and he was definitely comic-book fare. Given the politics of that era, it was only natural that he should align himself with Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Any space alien — any earthbound god, for that matter — who wasn’t just plain stupid was going to present himself on the White House lawn, not at the bloody Kremlin, and of course he would want to shake the President’s hand: there could be no higher honor in all the galaxy than to shake the hand of the President of the United States.

The world has changed a lot.

In 1978, the Mario Puzo script had Superman quoting his old line about “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” The audiences invariably laughed — something that would never have happened in the early 1960′s. Even so, Kansas was painted with spacious skies and amber waves of grain — the cinematic shot when Clark leaves his mother, shortly after Johnathan Kent’s death, is one of the most glorious shots of a Kansas field I’ve ever seen.

In this film, the Kansas flashbacks were color-unsaturated and tinted an overcast gray, like faded 8mm movie film. There was a grimness to all the characters more reminiscent of my actual memories growing up. Adults took themselves very seriously back then, and there was tremendous social pressure to conform, to not stand out. Boys all wore long pants and short hair. Girls all wore long hair and long skirts. The constant bullying and jockeying for dominance among the school kids — Weirdo. What’s wrong with him? — was certainly a big part of my experience. There was nothing salutary about it: it was simply ugly, and this film captures that.

The Krypton of this film was a crystal clear (if heavy-handed) allegory about our own Earth, particularly the United States, especially in the fact that Krypton makes no sense.

They have genetically pre-programmed citizens who, nonetheless, revolt or commit crimes regularly enough that they have a standard process of “somatic reconditioning” — extended torture — performed for centuries on end in a gravitational black hole dedicated to that purpose. They have a civilization spread across the stars that has died out everywhere other than Krypton without meeting any other intelligent life, yet they’re all perpetually geared up for the highest possible levels of war. They’ve mined the core of Krypton until the world is on the brink of literal collapse. Why? Because they needed energy and other “resources.”

What a bunch of Nimrods!

Every bit of this, of course, has direct connections to current events in the US: GITMO, our military-industrial complex, fracking, financial fraud, global warming. Put our story together, and it makes as little sense as Krypton.

Perhaps most interesting, however, is the portrayal of the military. For most of my adult life, we’ve had movies that either brazenly glorify the military and its traditions, or paint the Pentagon as a bunch of bumbling fools who are easily outmaneuvered by a couple of plucky kids.

This is the first blockbuster film I can remember that paints the paranoia and naked terror that lies just beneath the surface of our national military bravado.

People and their institutions are often studies in opposites. Military might, police procedure, and all other forms of institutional force are about maintaining control through one-sided threat of violence. Just underneath that attempt at control is the terror of not having control. Of chaos. Of disorder. Of counter-violence.

In Superman, the military gets to stand by and watch two gods duke it out. Bullets bounce off them; big bombs knock them off their feet and muss their hair; they move faster than any human can even follow with their eyes, and can vaporize you with a glance. If they notice you as an inconvenience, they might turn around and swat at you like you would swat a fly. If you survive, it’s only because they missed, and simply didn’t care enough to follow up with a second swat.

You cannot tell them what to do.

Defiance is the first fracture in the illusion of control, and generally brings a swift escalation in threat of violence. Try telling any cop who has just told you to get out of your car to stuff it sideways, and you’ll see exactly what I mean. This is why Superman allows himself to be handcuffed and led into an interrogation room, and he says as much: it makes the humans feel more comfortable. But then he tires of the posturing, and stands up, and the cuffs fall off like they weren’t even attached. He’s polite, but firm. He’s here to help, but on his terms. End of discussion. He waits patiently for them to get used to the idea.

They cannot tell him what to do. It terrifies them, because it destroys their illusion of control.

The fact is, in real life it is always an illusion of control, regardless of whether those who are charged with being in control realize it. The government cannot stop the Chinese from hacking US computers. The gun-wielding thief cannot actually force the store clerk give him money. The parent cannot control the child’s behavior. All any of these can do is threaten mayhem and hope the other person responds to the threat.

Superman is a myth, or an allegory, that can show us what happens when the illusion of control by threat of violence is dispelled, because he cannot be controlled by violence.

That was an interesting twist I wasn’t expecting.

I’d approach it from the most obvious angle: if you were an alien passing by the Earth in a flying saucer, what’s the very first thing you’d notice?

I’d say it would be the lights. Our cities can be seen clearly from space, shining out through the very narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies — above the radio bands — to which our atmosphere is transparent. A closer look reveals the immense complexity of our cities, our highways, and our patterns of traffic over the face of the earth.

No other species on Earth builds such complex hives and lights them this way.

Our city-building is just one example of a more general thing that humans do, which is that we deliberately coordinate and thus multiply our efforts, using the symbols of language to keep us together.

Members of most species communicate with each other: bees dance, birds call, marmots whistle. Some, like bees, tightly coordinate their activities through their language, but coordination is a necessity for survival of the individual bee: a single bee can’t survive long on its own, being too specialized in its body shape and capabilities. Species in which individuals can survive on their own, generally do so without all the fuss of such elaborate cooperative behavior. Species other than human, that is.

If we take this extreme degree of cooperation through symbols to be one of the unique identifying features of human beings, then it seems to me that the symphonic orchestra — whether of the Western or Eastern or some other variety — is the quintessential symbol of human uniqueness.

I’m thinking about this at the moment because I’m in the process of writing a symphony. I just finished an extended pizzicato passage in the strings, envisioning with a wry smile the conductor screaming “Keep your eyes up here!” as he tries to get thirty or forty people to all pluck their strings at exactly the same moment.

I’ve always been of the musical opinion — when writing music, anyway — that each part should have a certain stand-alone beauty, but what makes it a “symphony” is the way all of the parts come together into a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts: the word “symphony” is a Greek term that means “sounding together.” Simply doubling a melody in the flutes and clarinets, for instance, creates a rich, vibrant sound that can’t be produced by any single instrument. Weaving two different melodies creates at third thing that is nothing at all like either melody alone. But each part must be played precisely in time, precisely in tune, and precisely in balance: otherwise, “symphony” swiftly becomes “cacophony.”

Music is all the more quintessentially human in that it is of no practical use whatsoever.

All of the effort that goes into writing and performing a symphony serves only to make vibrations in the air that pass away almost as soon as they are produced. Creating music does not produce food, or shelter. It doesn’t drive away predators. It is not an essential part of human reproduction. It has no practical justification at all.

Its justification — its only justification — is that it evokes emotional states in its listeners. Some of those emotional states — fear, anxiety — can be easily produced by other means. Other emotional states — the pleasure of experiencing musical beauty, for instance — can be evoked only through music: there is no drug, no activity, no stimulus other than music that tickles that particular combination of cells in the brain and endocrine system.

That is, perhaps, why we would bother to invest so much effort into such a profoundly unpractical activity.

The symphonic orchestra is a signpost of civilization. It requires a kind of leisure that allows a talented individual to withdraw from the grain fields and the rice paddies and the fisheries and the mines to devote years of intensive practice to becoming skilled in the art of producing certain sounds at will. It requires a kind of leisure that allows for enough of these trained individuals to come together in one place, at one time, to practice making those sounds together until the result is ready for others to hear. It requires a tradition of communication — a musical language, a notation — that allows such a group to coordinate their efforts and play more than the hundred or so pieces they might memorize in one lifetime by listening and improvising.

As such, it strikes me that the symphonic orchestra is bound to be one of the most fragile of civilized artifacts. It cannot come into existence until a civilization reaches a certain point of wealth and stability — it will be one of the first things to vanish as a civilization declines.

There’s a sadness involved in writing a symphony for a symphonic orchestra, because I have little reason to believe it will ever be performed.

This isn’t quite as terrible as it sounds, because technology has put the symphonic orchestra within reach of the individual. With a computer and some software, I can generate a “demo” disk of my music that is almost as good a what would be produced by a good orchestra, and a darn sight better than what would be produced by a mediocre civic orchestra. It may even be superior to the orchestra that originally performed Beethoven’s legendary ninth symphony — since sound recording wasn’t invented until nearly a century after that performance, we have no idea what it might have sounded like.

So I will write my symphony, and I will perform it myself on a computer, and I will make the recording available to anyone who wants to hear it. It will make me happy, and probably most of those who hear it: it will tickle the appropriate nerve centers and endocrine systems.

But I can’t help but notice that the symphonic orchestra — that most fragile of civilized artifacts — is beginning to vanish.

I recently took a business trip to Minneapolis, and considered attending a concert during my stay, only to discover the Minneapolis Symphony lockout. One could view this as simply bad luck on my part. Or, one could take sides with the wicked, greedy, and self-centered musicians’ union, or with the wicked, greedy, and self-centered orchestra management, and yell and point fingers of blame.

The truth is simply this: the ticket sales just aren’t there any more.

There are lots of specific reasons for this, ranging from sluggish economic recovery, to the diversion of concert hall performances into “inaccessible” musical forms that have little general appeal as music.

I think the underlying cause is that our civilization is losing the ability and desire to support anything so frivolous as a symphonic orchestra.

I don’t see that as a good sign for our civilization.

I grew up in the 1960′s, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I started Kindergarten in 1962, a year before JFK was assassinated. Wyoming has always been at least ten years behind the rest of the country — “the 60′s” wouldn’t begin for another fifteen years. We were still buried deep in the 1950′s, maybe even the late ’40′s. The closest thing we had to “pornography” was Playboy Magazine, which in those days was just a tiny bit racier than a pin-up calendar you might find in the mechanic’s office: bare breasts, maybe a glimpse of a patch of pubic hair peeking out from behind a draped towel or a silk robe. The hardcore magazines weren’t easy to come by: you had to know someone whose father kept a stash in the footlocker in the basement where he kept his gun.

As a result, everything we actually knew about sex (and girls) came from older brothers, who were not very much more knowledgeable than we were. On top of that, they enjoyed tormenting their little brothers with misinformation. “Santa Claus” doesn’t even amount to a sno-cone shaved off the iceberg of misinformation we carried around daily.

I didn’t have any older brothers. But I had plenty of friends with older brothers, and those friends were the “worldly” kids in our school classes. They were the ones who taught the rest of us how girls got pregnant, and how babies were born, and what kissing was all about.

It reminds me now of the old joke:

Q: Why do blonde women have bruises around their belly buttons?
A: Because blonde men are dumb, too.

Yes, when I was in third grade, belly-buttons had something to do with sex. We weren’t entirely sure what, but we were sure of that much. After all, Craig Johnson’s brother had told him so. And he had a girlfriend.

So I think it was around third grade — I’d have been eight, going on nine — that the term “tittiebone” entered into our vernacular. Not a single one of us knew what it meant, so it quickly became an all-purpose pejorative. It’s something you’d shout at the opposing pitcher in a Little League game: “You TITTIEBONE!” School cafeterias served up tittiebone sandwiches. We’d call someone we didn’t like a tittiebone.  Anyone who touched a tittiebone got girl germs.

Within a year, the word was gone, swallowed up into the etymological void from which it sprang. It’s a word that will bring a faint smile to the lips of anyone who was in third grade in Cheyenne in 1965. Anyone else will scratch his head in befuddlement.

A friend and I, both distressed by the news, fell to talking the other night until the wee hours of the morning about a wide range of subjects that included terrorism, bombs, and guns, and that led to the discussion of a gun for “protection” in the house.

I don’t own any guns for any purpose, and I’ve occasionally wondered if I should have one for protection. I had a girlfriend once break up with me because I didn’t have a gun I could use to protect her and her daughter when the End of the World came, which she was convinced would be initiated by the Y2K computer bug.

I’ve tried to picture any realistic scenario in which a gun would protect me in my home.

I fail.

For instance, there’s the nightmare scenario where I live in a bad part of town, and someone bursts through my door without knocking. It turns out to be a SWAT team that really meant to be knocking down the door of a neighbor down the hall who runs a meth lab in his kitchen, and when I reach for my trusty nine, they make hamburger out of me before it clears my belt-line…. Skrrrrk. (That’s the sound of the rewind-erase button being pressed.)

For instance, there’s the nightmare scenario where I live in a bad part of town, and someone bursts through my door without knocking. It’s a drug-crazed customer of the neighbor who runs the meth lab in his kitchen. When I reach for my trusty nine, he puts sixteen bullets through me before it clears my belt-line…. Skrrrrk.

For instance, there’s the nightmare scenario where I live in a bad part of town, and someone bursts through my door without knocking. It’s a drug-crazed customer of the neighbor who runs the meth lab in his kitchen. He catches me with a beer in one hand and a bowl of popcorn in my lap. My trusty nine is on the end-table next to my bed in the other room; I don’t wear it inside my own apartment, particularly on a hot summer evening when I’m in my underwear, because it chafes. I smile and politely ask the meth-head to excuse me while I go get my gun…. Skrrrrk.

Right, so there’s this nightmare scenario where I’ve gotten a little older with a better-paying job and I’ve moved to a better neighborhood so I can raise my kids in relative safety, and some guy breaks into my house to steal my 12-year McCallan (even the thieves are higher-end here). It’s two in the morning, and I have to turn on the light to find my glasses, so I can hunt around in my dresser drawer for my trusty nine, which is currently unloaded because I keep the ammo separate from the gun, as is recommended by even the NRA when you have children in the house. The light and sound scares off the intruder, and I spend the rest of the night cursing up a blue streak because I can’t find the key to the ammo drawer…. Skrrrrk.

So the intruder at two in the morning is hopped up on bad drugs. When I turn on the light, he gets angry instead of scared and comes looking for me. He catches me in my underwear, blinking in the light, my trusty (unloaded) nine in my hand, trying to remember where I put the key to the ammo drawer, and …. Skrrrrk.

Okay, I keep my trusty nine in my dresser drawer next to my bed, loaded and ready to go, safety-on of course, and … wait, there are grand-kids in the house…. Skrrrrk.

There’s one simple, central problem with any “intruder came into my house” scenario. The intruder is already prepared for a confrontation. If he’s got a gun, then the gun is out, it’s loaded, and the safety is off. Even if he’s unarmed, he’s keyed up and ready to throw a cell phone at my head and run like hell at the first sign of trouble. By contrast, I’m invariably caught by surprise, because I’m not expecting an intruder. I’m watching television with a beer in one hand and popcorn in the other. I’m sitting at the dinner table. I’m catching up on my bathroom reading. I’m asleep in bed. The gun that I keep for protection is almost certainly out of my immediate reach, maybe in my dresser drawer, probably in a locked drawer or gun cabinet, likely unloaded.

Of course, there are the other nightmare scenarios.

I used to work late on contract down in Boulder, and my boss gave me a key to his house so that I could sleep there rather than making the late-night drive to Fort Collins. One evening, I forgot that he’d told me he had house-guests that weekend. He went home early to entertain them, and promptly forgot that I was working late.

I let myself into his house quietly, well after midnight, set down my things, and padded through the dark house up to the guest room, which was pitch black. I started to undress, when I heard a sudden snore, and someone turned over in the bed I was about to climb into. A big, male snore. I suddenly remembered the house-guests. Crap.

I very quietly slunk out of the room, down the stairs, and out the front door.

As it turns out, the father-in-law was upstairs; he never woke, and never knew I was there. The mother-in-law, however, had not been able to sleep, and had moved down to the couch in the living room. She was still mostly awake when I came in. She saw my dark silhouette enter silently, slink up the stairs, then slink down a few minutes later and vanish. She was too terrified even to scream: she was certain I’d murdered everyone upstairs in their sleep. Then she wondered if she’d been dreaming.

I was the intruder.

My friend said that he had experienced a similar situation, except he was the person at home, and one of his wife’s out-of-state co-workers walked into the house at midnight. She’d forgotten to tell her husband he would be arriving late and spending the night in the guest bedroom.

Or there was the time my sister barged straight into my house, carrying an infant in one arm and a folded crib with the other hand. She just turned the knob and shouldered the door open. No knock, no phone call, no notice at all, and she lived five hours away: the last person in the world I expected to walk through my door.

Thank goodness none of us had a loaded gun handy.

Of course, there are situations outside the home. A gun seems a little more practical outside the home. After all, you’re going out into that big, bad, scary world full of terrorists and drug dealers and thieves and murderers — you should be frightened, keyed-up, ready to react, right? You can strap on your six-gun and swagger a little, and if it chafes? Well, you can take it off again when you get home. In the meantime, you’ve made the world a little safer for everyone with your public display of lethal armament.

So the NRA argues.

Then I look at cops. They train to deal with physical confrontation. They keep their gun in easy reach, in a holster. They use a target range regularly. They call for backup at the first sign of real trouble.

With all that going for them, they can still die in a shoot-out with a terrified seventeen year old kid. So what chance do I really stand?

I like to play first-person shooter video games. They’ve taught me a valuable lesson: that I die a lot in a firefight. I die even when I know exactly what the other guy is going to do, because I’ve watched him make the same moves each of the fifteen times I’ve already died.

All of those miraculous bits of split-second timing in the movies use the same principle of repetition (plus a big helping of computer graphics): multiple takes of the same scene, over and over, practice makes perfect, until they finally get it right once. Then they cut-and-paste relentlessly until it looks natural.

In real life, muffing the first take means you lose an eye, or an arm, or your life. You don’t get a second take.

We had a tragic real-life situation a number of years back, where a woman, stalked by her psychotic ex-husband, was gunned down on the steps of the police station where she sought sanctuary. Someone wrote a letter to the editor claiming the tragedy would not have occurred if she’d had a gun and “stood up for herself” instead of running to the police.

I thought about that. The police station was diagonally across from the Catholic elementary school playground, and there were children playing there during recess who saw her get shot. I believe the husband was shooting from somewhere between the playground and the police station. Had she pulled out her trusty nine and shot back, she’d have been shooting toward the kids.

Just how good is her aim when her hands are shaking?

Plus, we need more mano a mano shootouts on our public streets? We’re sure the good guy is always the better shot? No one ever misses their target and hits someone in a nearby apartment or house or schoolyard?

The whole concept seems incredibly dim-witted.

Ah, the argument goes, but if everyone had a gun, the bad guys would be too intimidated to use theirs.

I pointed a gun at someone, once, to intimidate him.

It happened like this: I was working at my employer’s house in his extended home office, when he suddenly burst into the room and told me he needed my help. He had a shotgun.

“Jesus!” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Hoodlums,” he said. “They come up on my property and take drugs.”

“You’re going to shoot them?” I asked, appalled.

“Nah,” he said. “It’s not loaded. But I don’t want them to run off while I call the police.” He cracked it open and showed me — it was a simple, single-load shotgun, a bare metal pipe, and I could look down the barrel and see daylight.

I followed him outside, and he confronted two teen-aged kids sitting in a grove of trees just on his side of the property line. On the other side was a railroad right-of-way, and beyond that, a Wal-Mart parking lot. I couldn’t read the kids very well — they were probably pretty high on pot, so they were too mellow to react much, but I think they were also terrified and trying to cover it up. They just sat there with defeated “oh shit” expressions on their faces. I felt sorry for them.

“Here,” my boss said, and shoved the shotgun into my hands. “You keep an eye on these two while I call the cops.” He took a few steps away, turned his back, and pulled out his cell phone.

I stood with the gun pointed at the ground in the kids’ general direction and wondered how many laws I was breaking at the moment.

I’ve thought about that situation on and off over the last sixteen years, and in hindsight, I wish I’d handled it differently. While the boss was looking the other way, arguing with the dispatcher — he argued with everyone — I think I’d have pointed the gun away from the kids, and quietly gestured for them to beat feet and get out of there. The point had already been made: this is bad property to trespass, the guy who lives here is crazy and he has a gun.

Had our roles been fully reversed — had it been my property — I think I’d have handled it very differently. On the one hand, I’d probably have ignored it. Kids grow up and move on: the problem solves itself. On the other hand, there’s a reason these kids decided to light up right there and not somewhere else — probably convenience, and that will be the same for the next batch of kids, year after year — and there’s always the risk of a “tradition” forming around the spot. So if it really bothered me, I’d likely have walked up to them, hunkered down, maybe bummed a toke off them, and talked. I don’t personally care for cannabis, but there are proprieties to be observed when approaching members of a foreign and potentially hostile tribe. If you approach with respect, you’re generally okay.

I learned this from a different girlfriend — long blond hair, sexy, beautiful — who had once lived in one of the roughest neighborhoods of a big city. She didn’t have a gun. She didn’t need a gun. She had bikers. She befriended those rough, tough bastards who surrounded her, and they treated her like a favorite kid sister. Had anyone raised a finger against her, he’d have been hunted.

All it required from her was a little respect.

I think I could have reached a workable deal with the kids. Who knows — maybe a tiny touch of respect would have turned their lives around in a good way. Probably not. But being sucked up into the legal system as enemy combatants in the Drug War had zero potential for helping them in any way.

I’ve often thought about how dangerous my boss’s action was. The gun wasn’t loaded; even if it had been, it was a single-loader, and there were two kids. Suppose they had been armed? Supposed they had been jacked up on something crazy-making? Suppose they were as crazy and suicidal as the two kids at Columbine? Or the Sandy Hook shooter? What my boss did was classic escalation of threat of violence, simply assuming it would overwhelm these two kids and make them fearful and compliant. That’s not a reasonable assumption.

There’s an old saying: if you’re going to hunt bear, for God’s sake, use enough gun. If you’re going to threaten another person with deadly force, you need to be willing to use deadly force and then, for God’s sake, use enough gun. An unloaded single-shell shotgun pointed at two potential threats is not enough gun.

What I can say with absolute personal certainty is that pointing an unloaded shotgun at two teen-agers to bluff them into not running did not feel good, and it isn’t something I’d ever want to do again.

I can’t leave this topic without at least a mention of the paranoid, delusional “defending our nation against tyranny” argument for private ownership of assault weapons, which is basically an argument that owning a machine-gun with hollow-point rounds is a patriotic duty.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this idea, it’s based on the belief that The Real Enemy is Government: specifically the United States Federal Government. It claims the Second Amendment to the Constitution as the basis for our right to bear arms against our own government, should it get too uppity.

Well, that’s not what the Second Amendment is about. Truth is, they don’t teach what the Second Amendment is about in the schools, because it’s part of our shameful past as a nation.

The Second Amendment is about preserving slavery. Read this article — it’s an eye-opener. In a nutshell: the slave states had what they called “militias,” also known as “slave patrols.” White men in the slave states were required by state law to serve in the patrols — it was their duty, just like jury duty. Their job was to keep the African slaves under control, and to do so effectively, the militias needed to be armed. The slave-states feared that the wording of the Constitution was such that the federal government could disarm (and therefore abolish) their militias, thus destroying their ability to keep their African slaves, so they insisted on the Second Amendment as a condition to signing the Constitution.

We no longer have “militias” of this sort, because slavery is now illegal. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished the principle reason for the Second Amendment.

That isn’t to say that States could not organize militias against internal threats other than slave revolts, but the idea of “well-regulated” means that they are organized under and subject to state law, and are therefore subject to federal law as well. The State Highway Patrol could be considered a “well-regulated militia” organized under the Second Amendment.

Now I can’t speak to the broader question of whether or when we’ll need to throw off an oppressive Federal Government, a la The Hunger Games. But it’s quite clear that it isn’t legal to do this now, and isn’t going to be legal to do so then, with or without the Second Amendment. Furthermore, we come back to the earlier notion that if you’re going to hunt bear, for God’s sake, use enough gun.

A rabble of disgruntled citizens armed with assault weapons isn’t even close to enough gun for the job of overthrowing an oppressive national government. The only gun big enough for that job is a citizenry that is substantially willing to die rather than submit to continued oppression.

Such a citizenry doesn’t need guns to overthrow the government.

So how do I come down on the moral issue of owning guns for safety?

I have no idea: I can’t get that far. I can’t get past the practical issues.

When it comes to promoting safety, guns simply don’t work.

What guns provide is a means of projecting lethal force with great accuracy over a relatively long distance. They do that quite well, but that’s all they do. There are certainly times when that is appropriate. But it is lethal force. If you’ve used enough gun for the job, it will kill your target. If you don’t intend to kill your target, you’re using entirely the wrong tool.

Using a gun for intimidation does not promote safety: it is one of the riskiest things you can do. You rely upon the other person being afraid of death, and willing to stand down in the face of your threat of force. But the only thing you know about their mental state is that they are already outside the bounds of civil behavior: they’re in your house without permission, or they’re stalking you on the street, or they’re robbing a convenience store with a gun of their own. They’re a little bit crazy at the moment. How will they react if they see you pull out a gun?

You have absolutely no idea how they will react. No one does.

Maybe, like in the movies, they’ll suddenly come to their senses, and they’ll put down their weapon and meekly submit to being tied up with a convenient bit of rope lying nearby, so you can call the police and have them “taken away” to wherever the police take the bad guys when they tidy up.

And maybe Gwyneth Paltrow really will step out of her hiding place behind the Coke machine and smother you with kisses.

Maybe.

I sure wouldn’t bet my life on it.

A NASA scientist has now weighed in on this, Dennis Bushnell of Langley Research Center, and he seems to think there’s something to it.

There’s even a first theoretical framework for it, called the Widom-Larsen theory. It’s similar to what I outlined in general terms in a previous post, but with a small twist. Instead of needing to overcome the Coulomb barrier and jam a proton (hydrogen nucleus) directly into a nickel nucleus, this proposes that the hydrogen atom itself collapses into a neutron, which — lacking any electrical charge — effectively gets sucked straight into the nickel nucleus to produce an unstable isotope of nickel. The nickel then decays by emitting an electron and a gamma ray, converting it to copper.

From the outside, it looks exactly the same: same energy yields, same gamma rays, same everything. However, this mechanism is much more energetically plausible.

I find the signs of retrenchment even more interesting. I commented in my earlier post on how this is no longer called “cold fusion,” but instead “low-energy nuclear reaction” or “lattice-assisted nuclear reaction” (LENR or LANR, respectively). Dr. Bushnell had this to say:

The Strong Force Particle physicists have evidently been correct all along. “Cold Fusion” is not possible. However, via collective effects/ condensed matter quantum nuclear physics, LENR is allowable without any “miracles.”

The distinction here has to do with the “strong” nuclear force versus the “weak” nuclear force. Dr. Bushnell is doing some face-saving redefinition here, by making sure that “cold fusion” is directly tied to “miraculous” claims about the strong nuclear force, while what is actually happening is probably a result of the weak nuclear force. As it turns out, the strong force has been studied extensively, because it allows us to make big bombs. The weak force has received relatively little attention over the past century, because there was no obvious way to use it to make things blow up.

What Bushnell is really saying here is, “All right, we physicists were dead wrong about cold fusion, and we collectively and very publicly destroyed two scientific careers, as well as suppressing an entire field of research for twenty years. But you see, we weren’t really wrong at all, because it isn’t ‘Cold Fusion’ — it’s LANR, which is something we’ve just never looked at.”

It’s traditional face-saving, and while I’m going to point it out, I’m not going to pick it up and force him to eat it. What’s done is done.

What I find interesting is that this retrenchment indicates a radical shift in the politics of physics. This is covering fire to allow future research to reach some safe harbor of respectability, yet without requiring recantation or apology from any of the still-living and influential physicists who called cold fusion a load of bunk. Neatly done.

The fact that face-saving has begun indicates, to my mind, a very high degree of interest.

By women, I mean my wife, Marta. By always I mean “any time we are in disagreement about anything.” And by pragmatic, of course, I mean “right.”

The other day, while I was taste-testing the Australian Liverwurst, I wanted a second opinion, so I asked Marta to taste it. Mind you, this was after I had thoroughly aerated the wine, and had written in My Blog about the “finish of sour cherries” and let it off the hook with the self-deprecating “too tart for my taste buds.” Meaning, I’m obviously just a wimp. After all, a real man would take it that tart, and like it.

She swirled the glass. She sniffed.

“Ick,” she said.

She touched the wine to her lips and drew a tiny mouthful. She let the flavors blossom on her palate. Her eyes screwed up tight, and her lips puckered.

“Ick,” she said, and handed back the glass with her eyes tight-shut, as if to say, “Take this out of my sight. Better yet, get it out of my house.”

There really should be a revered position in the academic study of Aesthetics for the word, “Ick.” It cuts directly through all the geometric misdirection of ellipses, parables, and hyperbole, instantly resolves the ambiguity of simile and metaphor, transcends all fable, lore, and myth, and lays waste to paradigms, philosophies, creeds, and Schools of Thought.

Ick.

I’m even willing to wager a fair sum that it translates directly and without ambiguity into every language known to humankind, past, present, and future.

Ick is a valuable corrective to pretensions.

You see, there is this concept of the educated palate, which is somehow able to relish the subtleties that the uneducated palate cannot, and which presumably vastly expands the field of what is pleasurable to the taste. Indeed, it creates the entire hypothetical class of tastes which are “accessible” only to the educated palate. By the usual and ever-popular application of the Fallacy of the Inverse (or Denying the Antecedent) we arrive at the idea that therefore, if you find the taste inaccessible, you must not have an educated palate. You are a Philistine.

I’m hardly an accomplished oenologist, but I am a musician with a highly trained musical ear, and exactly the same fraud has been going on in the world of music for at least a century. Most music composed in the 20^th century — apart from “pop” music and movie scores — is “inaccessible” to any but the most rarified of educated musical ears. If you don’t like Bartok, you are by definition a Musical Philistine.

I remember once commenting, shortly out of college, that Dmitri Shostakovich was a talentless hack, and being told in response that I was the “most arrogant man in the world.”

It was a strange insult. After all, if it were true, it would be a compliment. It’s only an insult if it isn’t true, which takes all the sting out of it. Furthermore, although Donald Trump had not yet intruded on the national scene, I had already conclusively theorized his existence, so I knew I could not possibly be the most arrogant man in the world.

Arrogant or not, the fact remains that most of Shostakovich’s music evokes an instant response of Ick.

By contrast, the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony has never, to my knowledge, resulted in Ick. To the contrary, the first audiences stomped their feet until the balcony swayed, and ceased only when the conductor returned to the stage and performed it again. Nor does The Moldau, by Bedrich Smetana, ever invoke Ick: indeed, that one is enough to get you laid, if you play your cards right (I speak from personal experience).

The educated ear lets me enter into the joy of music more fully, yes. And it can occasionally — occasionally — take me past a visceral Ick into an appreciation of something playful or haunting, such as certain passages from Sergei Prokofiev’s two violin concerti. But it also makes me more aware of the Ick, not less.

An educated palate should not draw me away from a good wine, which I consider one which a dinner party of my friends will clamor for a second (or third) bottle to be opened, though hopefully they will refrain from stomping their feet until the balcony rattles. It should also lead me to appreciate a great wine, which is not one which I must struggle to get past the Ick through aeration of the wine and proper preparation of the senses: it is a wine that begins at good and then carries my educated palate into ecstasy.

Even if I’m belching garlic after a liverwurst sandwich on rye.

So back to women. And their damned pragmatism.

After we exchanged a few animated presentations of Various Points of View, Marta took the pragmatic stance of saying she would be picking wines from here on out. Like it’s that easy. Fine. We’ll just see how that goes.

So we came back from Wilbur’s with a box full of under-$10 wines.

Yesterday, Marta’s son and our grandson came up to spend the night — mom is in DC at a scientific conference — and I opened a BV Coastal Estates 2011 Zinfandel that Marta picked out. Under $10. Cheap, factory-bottled California swill. Marta had a glass, and made only faces of delight. Her son — a sparing drinker even on his wild nights — said, “Say, I’ll have another glass of that.”

And you know, it brought me all the way back to earth. Is it a great wine? Probably not. It’s a run-of-the-mill good wine, drinkable straight out of the bottle with no aeration, no special crackers or food pairings, and no fancy discussion of nose or legs or bloom or finish. It smells good, and it tastes good.

I think I’ll have another glass, too.

No, not rubber gloves, you naughty person. LaTeX, the mathematics formatting program.

But we can’t do math without a math problem, right? So let’s ask a math question: what does 2% annual growth of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) mean? Is this a good growth rate, or is it bad? Is it better than 1% growth? Is it worse than 5% growth?

As it turns out, all of these rates are catastrophic. But not in the way most would think.

Two percent growth means that at the end of the year, you have two percent more than you started with, or 102% of what you started with. “Percent” stands for “per centum” which is Latin for “in every one hundred.” So one percent is “one in every one hundred,” while two percent is “two in every one hundred.” So:

Percentage growth is also called “proportional” growth, because the growth is a proportion of what you started with. You can calculate it by simply multiplying the original amount by the proportion of growth, as follows:

If you keep growing at two percent each year, then at the end of the second year you have two percent more than you had at the end of the first year, which was already two percent more than you started with. So it looks like this:

At the end of the third year, you have:

At the end of ten years, you have:

This notation, the “exponential” notation, indicates that you multiply 1.02 times itself ten times. This is why proportional growth is also known as exponential growth.

You can do this pretty easily on a calculator by entering 1.02, then hitting the times button twice. Now, every time you hit the equals button, it multiplies the result by 1.02. The result on my little four-banger after hitting the equals button nine times is 1.21899…, or about 1.22 (note that you hit equals once less than the number of years you want, because the first time you hit equals, you get the total at the end of the second year.) That means after ten years, this modest little growth of two percent every year has become twenty-two percent total growth.

We can play with this a little more to bring out an interesting feature of exponential growth. First, I need to point out a property of logarithms, which I won’t bother to prove, as follows:

This turns out to be very useful in this next bit of reasoning.

IF

THEN

THEREFORE

What does this nonsense mean? It means that raising a small percentage growth (like two percent) to some exponent is exactly the same as raising the value two to some different exponent. And two means doubling. In other words:

The magic value of ln(2)/ln(1.02) is the doubling time for two percent annual growth. When n (in years) reaches the value of ln(2)/ln(1.02) = 35.003, the GDP will double:

A two percent annual growth means the GDP doubles every thirty-five years. In seventy years, it will double again, and will be four times its original value. In a little over a century, it will be eight times its original value.

proportional growth = exponential growth = doubling growth

This is simply mathematics.

Let’s do a little more advanced exploration of this exponential growth concept. There’s a common technique used in math called functional expansion. It lets you express a complicated function as a collection of simpler functions, typically a sum of simple functions. In particular, let’s do a conversion as follows, to make this a little easier:

The letter e represents a magic number, like π. It has a value approximately equal to 2.71828…. It’s a useful number, like π, which I won’t go into right now. This is the so-called standard exponential function, and k is just a constant number based on the growth rate of two percent, while n is the number of years. Let’s do a functional expansion of the standard exponential function using something called a Taylor expansion:

Why is this important?

It has to do with how fast things grow. We refer to the speed of growth as the order of the equation, such as  or  or . It’s traditional to use a capital N in this expression, but it means the same as the small n in this case. The reason this is important is that as n (or N) gets larger — as time passes — the maximum order of the growth starts to dominate everything. For instance, some quantity might grow like this:

where a, b, c, and d are constant values, and n is the number of years. Even if a, b, and c are very large, and d is very small, after enough time has passed, the dn³ starts to take over. This is because n³ grows much faster than n² or n. So we would call this  growth, or cubic growth, even though there are some other things going on.

In fact, a, b, and c could all be negative numbers: they could represent shrinkage, rather than growth. But if d is positive, no matter how small, this equation will eventually show cubic growth, and all of the shrinkage will become negligible.

Going back to our original economic question, let’s say we have a fixed amount of wealth that we keep in a cave, like a dragon’s hoard. This is proportional to the first term in our standard exponential equation:

That is, it’s a fixed constant. It may not be one, but it never grows, and it never shrinks, no matter how many years we keep it in the cave.

Now let’s assume we decide to walk around and pick up things we find along the path — shiny rocks, seashells, fruit that has fallen from the trees, that sort of thing. We can only walk so far in a given day, and can only pick up things that are within reach of whatever path we walk, so we can only add to our store of wealth a certain fixed amount — on the average — every year. That’s proportional to the second term in our equation:

Now let’s assume that we begin to have children, and that we start expanding across the surface of the earth at a steady rate from our original village. Let’s say we raise just exactly enough children to keep the population density constant as we take up more and more land. Every person walks about the same distance each year, but every year we have more people to cover more area, so our wealth increases as the size of the area. Areas are proportional to the square of the distance from the center, so this is proportional to the third term in our equation:

Obviously, we’re going to face a problem once we’ve covered the surface of the earth and can’t expand any more. But by then, they tell us, we’ll have space travel! So now we can expand into the third dimension, sending out space ships that move at a steady rate away from our original Earth. Every year we have more people colonizing more worlds and walking new paths within the volume of space we fill, which is proportional to the cube of the distance from the center. Thus, this is proportional to the fourth term in our equation:

I think the problem is pretty clear. To sustain exponential growth of wealth, we still have an infinite number of terms left to cover, and I’m pretty well out of ideas as to how we’d get to even the fifth term, let alone the thirty-seventh. After the thirty-seventh, there is still an infinite number of terms left.

Exponential growth is , which is faster — much faster — than populating outer space at the speed of light, which is only a paltry  .

There’s one more important characteristic of exponential growth. Chris Martenson over on his Crash Course in Peak Economics site gave a wonderful visual image of how exponential growth behaves, involving filling Fenway Stadium in Boston with water. To give a brief reprise, you find yourself handcuffed to the railing in the top row of seats at Fenway Stadium. A water main breaks right underneath the pitcher’s mound. It starts out leaking just one drop of water per minute, but every minute, that rate doubles: two drops, four drops, eight drops…. The two questions are:

1. How long does it take Fenway Stadium to fill completely with water, drowning you?
2. From the moment you notice that the stadium is beginning to flood, how much time do you have to get out of the handcuffs and escape to safety?

The answer (as I recall, and I haven’t checked his numbers) is that it takes something like 24 hours for the stadium to fill, but you won’t even be able to see the water from the top row until the last forty-five minutes.

Throughout his course he refers to the “hockey stick” shape of an exponential curve, meaning that it creeps along slowly and then — BANG — shoots through the roof. As it turns out, this is mathematically not quite correct, but it does give voice to something important about exponential curves. It has to do with how these higher-order terms start to dominate the equations. This is easier to show than to describe.

Here is an exponential curve seen from time 0.0 to time 1.0. At time zero, the function has a value of 1.00, and at time one, it has a value of about 2.72. In this range, we see only a gentle bend to an otherwise straight line.

Here’s that same curve seen from time 0.0 to time 5.0. At time zero, it has a value of 1.00, as before, while at time five, it has a value of about 148. Notice the small box showing the curve from 0.0 to 1.0 from the previous chart, and how sharply the curve bends upward after that.

Here’s that same curve seen from time 0.0 to time 10.0. At time zero, it has a value of 1.00, as before, while at time ten, it has a value of around 22,000. Notice again how much sharper the curve becomes after time 5.0.  The higher-order terms are beginning to dominate strongly now, and the curve is getting very steep indeed.

The point here is that exponential curves start out innocently. They look a lot like linear growth, as we see in the first chart. But as time passes, they accelerate. And accelerate. And accelerate. The acceleration never stops, and the curve grows impossibly steep.

But this idea of a “hockey stick” shape actually obscures the more important feature of exponential curves, illustrated below:

So what is this all about? Well, let’s take it in pieces.

First, note that the X-axis runs from zero to one for all three curves.

So the first equation is simply e^x from 0.0 to 1.0 — this is the very first chart we saw above, the one that looks almost like a straight line. We’ve subtracted its starting value from the result to shift it down so it starts at (0,0). We’ve then multiplied that by a constant which, if you look at it closely, is equal to one. Then we’ve added zero to it. Whoopee.

The second equation is a bit more interesting. The function is still e^x, but because we’re adding one to x, this is e^x  seen from 1.0 to 2.0: it’s where we see the curve getting steeper in the second graph. In this case, we again subtract its starting value (e¹), divide it by its total height (e² – e¹), and then multiply by the total height from time 0.0 to 1.0 (e¹ - e⁰), so that this new function fits on the y-axis of the old graph. Finally, we’ve added a smidge (0.01) to push it up a bit, so we can see the curve.

Just to make sure, we did this one more time, this time looking at e^x from 2.0 to 3.0, again scaling it so it fits on the same chart with the original curve, and adding a smidge more to separate the lines.

The curves are identical in shape.

What does this mean? It means that over any fixed range of time (in this case, one unit of time), regardless of where it is located in the curve, the curve is “scale-invariant” — it is exactly the same curve, just viewed at a different scale. The “hockey stick” shape is an illusion of scale.

This is what really underlies what is happening in the Fenway Stadium Drowning Incident.

Exponential curves move through different scales of magnitude at a constant rate. When the water main leak starts, it is of concern only to microbes handcuffed to the top row of a thimble. It is far beneath our human “scale of relevance.” It is unimportant to us.

But the problem doesn’t merely get bigger, like a single dripping faucet that eventually fills the basement. The problem keeps changing scale, and then doing exactly the same thing all over again at the new scale: that is precisely what “scale-invariance” means. After it has drowned the microbes, it starts to drown larger creatures, like ants, in exactly the same way. Then rats. Then cats. Then big dogs. Then people. Then elephants. Then giants. Then mountains. Then continents. Then planets.

An exponential water leak in Fenway Park, could its growth be sustained, would drown the entire universe in a finite amount of time. And at that point it would only be getting warmed up for the real work.

As humans, we have a fixed scale of relevance. The flooding of an anthill is of little concern to us. The flooding of a continent — or a solar system — is too big for us to cope with, almost too big to imagine. There’s just this narrow range of scales that’s important to us. Something on the order of yards, and pounds, and gallons, and years. That’s the human scale.

Exponential curves aren’t like that at all. All scales are relevant to them, sooner or later. They methodically plod through them all, taking successively bigger and bigger steps.

So the issue we have with exponential curves as humans is that it takes astonishingly little time for them to pass straight through our scale of relevance, from “negligibly small” to “intractably huge.” The reason we have only forty-five minutes to get out of our handcuffs, rather than the full twenty-four hours after the problem started, is because the exponential growth of water didn’t intrude on our scale of relevance for twenty-three hours and fifteen minutes. And then, in forty-five minutes, it ripped right through our entire scale of concern, from “puddle” to “catastrophe.”

Here’s the part that Chris didn’t talk about. Should the leak continue to grow at an exponential rate, it won’t matter whether you get out of your handcuffs. In a matter of minutes after the stadium floods, all of Boston will be awash in a tidal gusher fountaining from the pitcher’s mound. Some minutes after that, the entire United States will be underwater, with a gravity-distorting tidal wave of water rushing toward Europe and Asia. Within a few hours or days, water will fill the entire Solar System and will put out the sun.

By the time this exponentially growing watery menace intrudes on the scale of relevance for the Galactic Federation of Planets, they will have about forty-five minutes to save the entire galaxy.

Now, if this seems to be getting silly, it is.

It’s silly because nothing in nature can sustain exponential growth.

In nature you’ll see brief spurts of exponential growth, as when yeast cells divide in a vat of beer wort, or as when a new product is first introduced to the marketplace. After that, the exponential growth scales back until it reaches no-growth. Then it reverses, declines, and is recycled to make room for the next wave of growth for something else.

Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it simply will not tolerate sustained exponential growth.

So let’s go back, now, to that original economic question. What is the appropriate growth rate for the GDP? Five percent? Two percent? One percent?

The correct answer is zero percent. The economy cannot sustain exponential growth at any rate.

At this point, you may be suffering a little bit of cognitive dissonance. After all, the news is constantly yammering about how the GDP grew two percent this year, or a disappointing one percent, and how growth is necessary for a “healthy economy.” And what about investment income? People get a percentage return on CDs, and savings accounts, to say nothing of stocks, bonds, and futures. It’s how the economy works.

Right?

Wrong. This takes us right into the heart of the shell game that is our modern economy.

Rather than trying to summarize this, I’ll refer you to Chris’s excellent Crash Course, as well as John William’s Shadowstats site.

Physical reality trumps economic theory. Nothing in nature can sustain exponential growth. So if economic theory is reporting exponential growth, there is a big mistake in the theory.

The presenting symptom of this big mistake is inflation. Chronic inflation is a symptom of faulty economics and a broken economy.

Monetary inflation is simply a matter of the money supply increasing in excess of the real economy the money is used to facilitate.

If there’s one chicken left in a village, there will be a bidding war for the chicken, and whoever has the most money will get the chicken. Let’s say that’s $10. Now, let’s give everyone in the village an extra $10. There’s still only one chicken, so now the bidding war will end at $20 instead of $10, and the same person goes home with the chicken.

The chicken is the real economy. Adding money to the village doesn’t change anything but the price of the chicken. The same is true of any other good or service in the village: all the prices rise as you pour in money, because everyone has more money, but no more goods or services to trade. This is monetary inflation.

The proper reason to increase the money supply is to match a growing real economy, to keep prices stable. Otherwise the money itself grows scarce, and you see monetary deflation.

Consider doubling the size of the village, and the number of chickens (and everything else) but leaving the amount of money the same. The original inhabitants all have money, but the newcomers are flat broke and can buy nothing. Over time, that money will disperse to everyone, but on the average, people will have only half as much money — the same total amount, spread out over twice as many people. If they eat all the chickens but one, the bidding war will only be able to go up to $5. Prices fall.

When money deflates, people start to hoard it as precious in its own right, and then trade breaks down. So it’s important to pump more money into the village so that prices go back up to $10 and stay there as the real economy grows.

But if you pump too much money into the village, prices will rise above $10 through monetary inflation. When inflation keeps happening, year after year, you have a chronic problem with your money supply. When the inflation rate is exponential, you have an exponential problem.

If you browse the Internet for old product catalogues, it doesn’t take long to realize how far things have gone. In 1960, a new sedan, straight off the showroom floor, sold for about $2500. A new pair of jeans cost about $1.50. A simple meal in a diner cost $1.00. My father bought a new house in the suburbs for $16,000.  Gasoline cost $0.35/gallon. Penny candy cost a penny.

Just shift that decimal point over, and you’re looking at today’s prices for the same kinds of goods, with remarkably few exceptions (like computers). When computers finally reach the end of their run with Moore’s Law — they’re getting close — you’ll start to see them subject to the same inflation as everything else. We’ve seen an average of about 5% per year between 1960 and 2006, just based on the 10-fold increase in prices over that forty-six-year period. The annual rates have varied — I remember it going up to around 13% in the late 1970′s, and some years have had lower inflation rates.

But overall, the US dollar is being exponentially eroded by inflation. And remember how exponential problems rip through our scale of relevance. What we see in our economic system right now is the puddle on the pitcher’s mound. The problem is changing scales even as I write.

Chris and John can take you on a tour of exactly how this all operates: GDP and CPI, hedonics and weighting and chaining and more tricks and traps for your edification and amusement. All a collection of desperate contortions to deny that there’s a problem, because we won’t (or can’t) get out of the handcuffs.

It’s quite a ride.

The next wine is from The Cellar, their March offering (yes, I picked it up ‘way late). It’s a Shiraz (that’s the grape) from St. Hallett of the Barossa of Australia, a wine they call their 2011 Faith. I actually opened it on Thursday, two days ago.

Thursday was a tough day. When I went to bed on Wednesday, I was a bit uncomfortable between the legs, and poking around, I felt something that scared the living crap out of me. Women are supposed to check their breasts, men their testicles. But they never tell you exactly what you’re looking for.

So I didn’t sleep much. I got an appointment with the doctor on Thursday afternoon, and it turns out to be a Nada Grande — a Big Nothing, a very-typical-in-men-your-age Big Nothing. These are the hypochondriacal pangs of aging, so stand warned, you young whippersnappers. You’ve got a lot to look forward to.

When I came home, I opened the Faith to celebrate. Maybe it was the stress and lack of sleep, maybe it really was the wine, but the first whiff of the bottle was not a fragrance, nor even an odor, but a reek. Liverwurst. If you think green bell pepper doesn’t belong in a wine, liverwurst doesn’t belong anywhere near the bottle, much less in the bottle. I actually was foolish enough to pour a bit and taste it, and it was a cacophony of horrible off-flavors. Ack.

I screwed the cap back on — a footnote, here, more and more wineries are turning to screw caps. The cork that has traditionally been used for corking the bottle comes from the underlayer of the bark of the cork tree, which grows only in Portugal. And there isn’t a lot left. For a while wineries switched to recycled cork, a mixture of some polymer and bits of authentic cork, and a lot of other vineyards went to straight plastic, but the increasing trend is the screw-top. We’re starting to see screw-tops on even the top-end wines.

I screwed the cap back on, and uncorked a Fleur de Lyeth Cabernet — another of my own random choices from Wilbur’s — and it poked me in the mouth with both green bell and jalapeño peppers, at three or four times the intensity of the blend that went down the sink. Ack.

So I did the smart thing and uncapped a Sam Adams. That tasted just fine.

Palates go south. All the senses do. I remember days back when I played the violin a lot, where every note I played — or heard — sounded flat. It didn’t matter if the note was actually sharp: it still sounded flat. I don’t really know what is the best thing to do when that happens. A professional would learn to compensate and soldier on. My strategy has always been to step away from the whole mess and get a good night’s sleep. So far, it’s always been back to normal the next day.

So I hadn’t gotten around to the Faith again until today. I just now uncapped it, and tentatively sniffed, and this time it smells like wine. Not liverwurst. That’s a good start.

The color is a deep purple typical of a Shiraz. Not the blood-red vampire memoir ink color of the last one, but a cherry red edging toward purple. I tasted the wine, gingerly, and it was really, really “hot,” which — to me — means it’s chock-full of compounds related to fermentation: aldehydes, ketones, and all the other volatile hydrocarbons that taste like floor cleaner. Fumes go up your nose and burn. Hot.

Did I ever mention that I’m kind of stupidly persistent?

I poured a glass through my $25 aerator. The Cellar’s notes on this wine — on all their reds, so far — say that it “needs air.” One way to do this is to pour the wine into a decanter and let it sit for a day or two. The quicker way is to slap an aerator on the bottle and just pour. The next sip of aerated wine suggested the wine was actually drinkable.

Sometimes, stupid persistence pays off.

After thorough aeration, it (now) has a good Shiraz nose, very fruity, with a pleasant fragrance that smells floral, but like a fruit blossom rather than a woman’s perfume. It’s not as tart as some Shiraz I’ve had, and I like that — Shiraz can be a pucker-fest, sometimes. Full fruit flavor, almost too much. This one has a medium-length finish, where the tartness and the alcohol evaporate and leave a sharp — pleasantly sharp — memory of sour cherries that slowly fades. I experience some puckering, and it leaves my mouth feeling dry.

Overall, I’d call this at best a very touchy wine that needs — not wants, but needs — some thorough aeration before you even want to sniff around it. Even after that, it’s too tart for my taste buds. Not a keeper.

Never one to pass up serendipity when it slaps me in the face, I visited The Cellar, and fell to talking with the owner, who had just started a Wine Club. You give him your credit card number, and he picks a wine every month and bills you for it. If you like it, you can buy more at the discounted price of the Club. Why not? I signed up for the $15 “Silver” plan.

Truth is, I’ve tried $25 and even $40 bottles of wine, and it was a waste of both money and wine. I actually had a single glass from a $200 bottle once — I was on a business trip with two corporate Vice Presidents who were impressing and being impressed by another corporate Vice President from DuPont — and that was a good wine. I was all of twenty six years old, and had no idea what I drinking. It was red, it was delicious, and I managed to (somehow) stay sober enough to keep my mouth shut at the table. I wouldn’t mind receiving a case of that, whatever it was, as a Christmas gift. But I generally find my favorites in the under-$15 range.

Anyway, every month when I go in to pick up a new wine at The Cellar, the owner asks, “So how did you like the last wine?” Usually, not so much. After a month, however, I don’t even remember the type of wine, much less what I did or didn’t like about it. That isn’t really fair.

So I think I’m going to start wining a little on this blog, as a counterpoint to whining about the fall of Western Civilization and all that. After all, the whole problem with watching civilization flush itself is that a lot — a lot — of really cool stuff goes with it. One example of which is truly excellent, inexpensive wine.

It’s worth saying that I’m an absolute amateur when it comes to wine. A total tyro. A bloody beer drinker. So any true connoisseurs out there can just keep quiet and let me embarrass myself in peace. Which I intend to do without restraint or further apology.

—

At the moment, I have open a Fleur De Lyeth (that’s the winery, located in Saint Helena, CA), something they call their 2011 “A proprietary California red wine.” They don’t have a single word about what kind of grape is in it. I suppose that’s covered in the “proprietary” part.

I opened it yesterday, and I don’t like it much more today than I did yesterday.

Incidentally, this is NOT a wine from The Cellar. This is something I picked up blindly on a “wines for under $12″ random tour of Wilbur’s, and I chose it because I liked the label. Period.

The first thing you notice about a wine is the smell.

Well, no, that’s not true at all. The first thing you notice about a wine is the price, and the size of the bottle, and the label. And the second thing you notice is the color. Usually red, or pale yellow, or somewhere in-between. This one is a dark enough red to dip in a quill and write your sparkly-vampire memoirs with it. I like the dark red wines.

So the third thing you notice is the smell. That’s “fragrance,” unless the wine is really awful, in which case you can call it the “odor.” The connoisseurs use the term “nose,” which skirts around the question of whether it was a “good nose” or a “bad nose” (I’m thinking of Dorothy upon meeting the White Wine Witch of the North) unless you happen to be in the company of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which case referring to the “nose” of anything is asking for a fat lip.

This nose is complicated. There’s something distinctly floral in it that overwhelms the underlying smell — sorry, “fragrance” — of grapes. Something dry and slightly pungent, like a floral perfume. I wish I knew my flowers, but I don’t. Well, that’s not entirely true: there’s Rose, everyone knows that one, and then Mirabilis (we had a big bush in the back yard when I was growing up) and Baby’s Breath (cloying and bitter) and Chrysanthemum (the vegetable equivalent of body odor) and Sweet William (the vegetable equivalent of a fudge-chocolate brownie covered with almond sauce.) I don’t know this flower. One of the dry, pungent ones.

I don’t like to mix perfume with wine. It’s like kissing a woman on the neck and getting a mouthful of Eau de Something-From-A-Small-Bottle. Of course, it is wine (or kissing a woman on the neck) so you don’t let that slow you down. But you can’t help thinking about gargling a few ounces of whiskey to clear the tongue.

Sure enough, the first flavor that hits me is green bell pepper, which simply does not belong in a wine of any color. Well, maybe a green wine. I’ve never tried a green wine.

After the bite of green pepper passes, the blend is very, very smooth. It doesn’t burn or pucker the way some Merlots do, and it isn’t a punch in the mouth with fruit flavors. Not tart, not sweet. Just smooth. And, unfortunately, with no “finish” to speak of. One of the best parts about a rich wine is when it stays on your tongue afterward, filling your head with fragrances (not odors) and flavors (not tastes) and memories of places you’ve never been and things you’ve never done. They call that the “finish.”

Alas, this wine just … vanishes. A flash of green pepper, utter smoothness, and then … nothing. Your mouth tastes like mouth.

Now that I’m a little deeper into the bottle, the Pinot grape is coming out strongly, which explains all of this. Pinot always reminds me a little of bubble-gum, which is at the stale end of the floral fragrance I started with. I watched the movie (or “film”) Sideways, and went through a brief Pinot phase. It didn’t last very long. I’m not a big fan of Pinots.

I saw Fleur de Lyeth all over the shelves at Wilbur’s so I’ll probably want to try some of their other grapes or blends at some point. But this one isn’t on my keeper list.

I got this response from a fellow in Finland.

I often feel astonished when reading these comments. You are so lonely over there in America. It is same as with our own overeducated, liberal burghers here. Themon mentioned “taking matters to his own hands” considering his old age, because your governmental pension system is collapsing. What has government to do with this? I understand from his comment that he has many sons. Is it not responsibility of his children to take care of him, when he is old?

Of course it is. And of course it isn’t.

We’ve recently had to say good-bye to an elderly friend. I used to take her to the movies every couple of weeks, and we’d discuss the acting and plot at length on the way home. My wife had been her daily phone contact, medical power of attorney, and general-purpose guardian angel. Our friend has no children, and her three sisters are scattered throughout the southwestern US, all at least a thousand miles distant.

The old dear is moving rapidly now into full senile dementia. Call it Alzheimer’s. She has trouble remembering the names of her sisters. In a few days, or weeks, or months, she will forget about us. She will gradually lose control of her bladder, and her bowels. She will be unable to walk without falling, and falls will result in life-threatening gashes, broken bones, and internal bleeding, so she will be confined to a wheelchair. If she lives long enough, she will forget her own name.

She’s at one of the difficult stages right now: belligerent, obstinate, argumentative, and paranoid. It’s understandable. It seems to her that we are all conspiring against her, because she cannot remember the discussions held in her presence, and remembers with crystal clarity conversations that never occurred. These memories change constantly. Her self-awareness and judgement are compromised. She thinks she is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, just as she always has, yet has no idea where the bloody gash on her arm came from, or the bandage — and she’s likely as not to just rip it off and invite sepsis.

It is appropriate that her sisters take over her care. So we’ve relinquished powers-of-attorney. Traded phone numbers. Briefed and debriefed.

Shed tears and said good-bye.

We recognize the patterns, because we went through it with my father from 2004 to early 2009. He was once a professional surveyor — he laid in highway tunnels bored blindly through solid rock from both sides of the mountain, to meet in the middle, and climbed those mountains to set up his theodolite. He was one of the first computer programmers in the State of Wyoming. When I was young, he taught me elementary cryptanalysis, morse code, woodworking, bookbinding, a bit about electronics and ham radio. He gave me my love for classical music.

Toward the end, changing the batteries in his television remote control was too complicated for him. He began to introduce me to the staff as his brother. He forgot his wife of forty-five years — she passed in 2000 – and would often scowl in a puzzled way and ask me if he’d been married.

The needs of an elder in such a decline eventually exceed the capabilities of the most devoted children. My wife and I took my father to lunch and the grocery store until he could no longer manage the trip. Soon after that, any kind of outing — a drive to the mountains, or a lake — confused and terrified him. Loss of bowel control made any trip a potential for unpleasant humiliation. When he got out of bed in the middle of the night and fell and broke a hip during his last year, it took two strong men to lift him from the floor: my wife and I together could not have managed it, nor should we have tried. He needed substantially more care — different care — than the two of us could give.

Such care costs money. At the very end, we were paying over seven thousand dollars per month for his room and board. ^[1] Over eighty-four thousand dollars per year. We managed the costs by selling his house, the house he’d raised my sister and me in. Had that money run out — had he lived another year — we would have had no choice but to let him fall back on government assistance as an indigent.

We could not care for him, and could not afford to pay others to care for him.

People who have not been through this, who speak glibly about children caring for their elders, have no idea what they are talking about.

There are limited solutions to the problem of old people who are past their years of usefulness. Let me list them, just for the record:

1. Bring Out ‘Cher Daid — from the skit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Adult children simply look the other way while someone clubs their useless parents and throws them on a cart. Or the children do the clubbing themselves, if they’ve the stomach for it.
2. The Kevorkian Plan — we cultivate a national attitude, and perhaps even a new religion, that glorifies suicide. We make lethal drugs and suicide assistance readily available to the old, cross our fingers, and hope that enough of them will do the right thing when the time comes. Otherwise, we have to club them.
3. The Natural Plan — we bring back smallpox and plague, and let God take the elderly and the weak the way He apparently intended. Or, as a variant, we could cut off all medical aid to anyone over the age of, say, eighty. Maybe seventy-five, to be safe. Or we could simply let the elderly and the handicapped die of neglect if they can’t take care of themselves. Survival of the fit, and all that.
4. The Capitalist Plan –  “let the market take care of it.” That’s exactly how things are done in Colombia, where my wife’s father lives and is now tipping into senile dementia. Options for an elder in Colombia are personal wealth, followed by family, followed by the street. Personal wealth (unless it is vast) will run out if you live too long, so this places many families in the dilemma I described above: unable to provide care, and unable to afford to pay others for the care. This was also the norm in the London of Charles Dickens’ time.
5. The Socialist Plan — we recognize this as a community problem and deal with it as a community, specifically by  contributing our means to help care for other people’s elders.

Unless one is a psychopath, the first three options are intolerable, and they are morally justifiable – if at all – only in the most brutal sorts of raw survival scenarios.

The fourth option is empty talk. In a society where wealth is plentiful and broadly distributed, it could perhaps be reasonably argued by reasonable people. In our society as it exists right now, this is merely whitewash for one of the first three options. Far less than one percent of our population has the kind of personal or family wealth that allows them to drop eighty-four thousand dollars a year on end-of-life care. The marketplace mandates the murder of those who live too long, and destroys their families in the process. In the words of Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge, “They’d rather die than go to the workhouses and prisons? Then let them be quick about it, and rid the earth of excess population.”

The fifth option is the one that all all pre-modern societies adopted and lived by. The elders are a community resource, and a community problem, and everyone contributes to their care. It is the model that this country accepted until very recently.

For examples of the fifth option, we can go all the way back to the tradesmen’s confréries, or brotherhoods, in the fourteenth century at the dawn of modern capitalism; scarcely a time of any imaginable kind of nanny state. Or we can look at the “mutual aid societies” of the nineteenth century, such as the Odd Fellows or the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks. We  can even look at modern auto, home, life, or health insurance. They all run on the same basic principles:

1. Everyone contributes, irrespective of need.
2. Everyone (once vested) benefits, irrespective of contributions.

Another way of putting this is:

1. From each, according to ability.
2. To each, according to need.

Some people may recognize this as the (stated) foundational principle of the old Soviet Worker’s Paradise, but it predates the Soviets by thousands of years. It’s an example of what is more generally called a “hedge,” which is — as the word implies — a kind of fence or barrier against ill-fortune. One of the earliest examples I can think of is in the Bible, where the captive Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham of Ur interprets Pharaoh’s dream of the starving cattle to mean that a famine is coming, and advises him to build granaries to store seven years of grain for the lean years. The granaries are a hedge, and Joseph is serving as an actuary — the person who figures the odds and determines how much to store, and for how long.

The United States has a perfectly functional way of doing this at the national level: it’s called Social Security.

Social Security is nothing new, and nothing unusal. It is the Pharaoh’s granaries, the weavers’ confrérie, or the Odd Fellows Society on a national scale. It is a hedge against the infirmities of old age. It has worked extremely well, not for merely seventy-some years, but in varying forms for many centuries.

As a national hedge, Social Security has some significant advantages over the older (and smaller) aid societies and brotherhoods.

First, membership is — with a few exceptions — mandatory, and dues are scaled to income. This makes its risk pool — a technical term for the group of people covered — stable and vast, and size alone reduces overall risk. A local Odd Fellows’ chapter with one hundred members  might be able to support one centennarian in a nursing home, but not two. A larger Odd Fellows’ chapter with 1000 members would probably never face the issue of having twenty centennarians at the same time. Social Security, with over a hundred million members, will never face the problem two million centennarians – at least, not with the current state of medicine.

Second, Social Security is transparent, unlike private brotherhoods. The townhome I used to own had its entire capital fund stolen by its management company years before I moved in, after which the owner of the management company downed a fifth of whiskey and drove his car into the local reservoir. Most people are aware of how corporate retirement funds were pilfered by their corporate and union officers during the last decades of the last century. Do I even need to bring up Bernie Maddoff or Goldman Sachs? Social Security isn’t immune to pilfering, but the thief is Congress, and the theft is open for all to see.

Third, gaming Social Security is a federal crime against the government, and a portion of Social Security contributions goes to policing fraud. Gaming a private fund is merely being a clever fellow, assuming the fund managers even detect the fraud. In a small fund, like our townhouse association fund, there may not even be enough money for an annual audit, much less fraud prosecution for those who profit by gaming it.

Social Security does have some downsides, but they don’t include any of the bilge that comes out of the current so-called ”national discussion” about Social Security. The wealthy do not now, and will never pay for Social Security, nor benefit significantly: it is entirely about working people bearing the costs of working people. Illegal aliens aren’t eligible for Social Security: it takes ten years of contributions to become vested in the program. The “welfare mother driving a Lexus” myth is something I addressed a long time ago in a different post. The “Congress has stolen the trust fund” myth is untrue. Calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme betrays complete ignorance of what a Ponzi scheme is, as well as how Social Security works. The “Social Security is going broke” myth is something I believed through my younger years, but only because I never bothered to look into the matter. It isn’t going broke, and never will. What it does need is a 2% course-correction now so that it doesn’t face a temporary and partial (but serious) problem twenty years from now.

The latest conceit to come out of Washington is the “we can’t afford it” bleat. Given the alternatives — such as clubbing our elders and throwing them in a mass grave — I have to ask, how can we not afford it? Right now, 15.3% of our total US working wage is going into maintaining our non-working elders, the disabled, and public health. This needs to rise to 17.3% to ensure stable benefits for the next seventy-five years. Can we not afford eighteen percent? Twenty percent? Twenty-five percent? Even fifty percent?

As an alternative to pushing our elders off the roof, of course we can afford this. Only a psychopath would claim otherwise.

Yet we are having this psychopathic national conversation that eighteen percent is “too much.” People in Washington are able to say with a straight face, over and over, that we have absolutely no choice but to make deep cuts in our entitlement programs.

This is bullshit.

Now, Social Security does have some big problems, but no one is talking about those problems because they are far too scary for people to even admit they exist.

The first real problem is the US economy — and the world economy — as a whole. You’ll hear two things from economists about the current economy. First, you’ll hear that it’s improving, right on schedule. On the heels of that, you’ll hear that it’s “puzzlingly sluggish.” Unpacking that could get complex, but I’m going to cut right to the chase: the real economy is flat or shrinking, and the only “economy” that is improving is the numbers game on Wall Street. That is, the only growth the US economy is actually experiencing is in financial bubbles.

That isn’t exactly true, but it’s a lot truer than most anything else you’ll hear.

This has two direct consequences for Social Security.

The first consequence is that Social Security contributions, which are based on wage income, which is based on real jobs in the real economy, are going flat or declining. All of the actuarial predictions for Social Security project growth in contributions based on a growing economy. Those predictions are flat-out wrong, and it will take a few more years for “puzzlingly sluggish” to become “alarmingly sluggish” and then “inexplicable.” In the meantime, they’ll continue to corrupt the economic indicators to prevent panic and try to make everything look rosy. I suspect that economic theory won’t change until the current crop of economists dies and is replaced. As one of the famous physicists of the last century quipped, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.” Until then, the ongoing economic reality will remain “inexplicable.”

The second consequence is inflation. It turns out that the CPI — Consumer Price Index — is so heavily manipulated, it may be as much as eight percent below the real inflation rate. This means that the COLA — Cost Of Living Adjustment –for Social Security is entirely inadequate. And that means that Social Security is gradually becoming irrelevant. Before it gets to Irrelevant, it will pass through the difficult stage of Intolerable, which will send seniors to Washington en masse with torches and pitchforks. Maybe that’s when the psychopaths in Congress are planning to club them all.

The other real problem Social Security faces is politics.

I’m not talking about the recent partisan gridlock, odious as it is. I’m talking about the fact that US Americans have lost control of their own government.

The discussion taking place in Washington about “entitlements” is as clear an indication as anyone could need that the government is entirely decoupled from the needs of people, just as Wall Street is decoupled from the needs of business. Social Security is subject to Congress, and we cannot trust our own Congress because it no longer represents our needs. Congress is currently torn between its own petty court intrigues, and the ill-conceived, short-sighted whims of the class that purchases members of Congress through campaign funding. We, the people, are as irrelevant to Congress as dandelion fuzz.

Perhaps this loss of our Congress merely reflects that, at a deeper level, we’ve lost any sense of national unity — or any sense of communal identity at all.

After all, what do you do with a world-class military superpower when the Great Enemy that defined it — the Soviet Union — up and vanishes? All tanked up and no place to party. Or maybe the big breaking point was the national catastrophe of Vietnam. Or perhaps it goes back to Truman dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. I don’t really know when we stopped being Americans and started being so damned selfish.

You know, we could take great national pride in the way our Social Security program keeps an old black woman in downtown Los Angeles from starving to death. Do we take such pride?

Not to hear people talk. Some sniff and say she should have worked harder and built up an adequate 401K fund for herself; that she’s a leech and worthless drain on society. Others say her kids ought to take better care of her: they fault her as a bad parent if none of them turned out rich. Some fault her for living too long. Some fault her because she’s a single woman. Some fault her because she’s black. Whatever the excuse, it seems that no one wants to put 15.3% of their money in her tin cup. That’s confiscatory taxation. It’s morally wrong.

Wow.

I can understand people who are confused about Social Security. A lot of lies have been told, professionally designed to promote hysteria. You have to do some research to realize that Social Security is a brilliant legacy of a past when it seems people were smarter and better human beings than they are now, and that the program is — apart from the general decay of our whole culture – still fiscally sound: certainly more so than anything Wall Street has to offer. I understand that people simply don’t know this, because they’ve been lied to for so long.

I even understand half of the people who originate the lies: the Wall Street sociopaths, who simply want to suck the Trust Fund — some two and a half trillion dollars — into their three-card Monte game, where most of it will magically vanish into their pockets. I hold them in contempt, but I understand them. They are just commonplace thieves with bottomless appetites who grow fat on the wealth of others. It’s all they know how to do, and they’re good at it.

But there’s this other crowd, this “moral” crowd, that I don’t understand at all: the group of people who think sharing is simply bad. It cannot be tolerated. It must be stopped at all costs. Social Security must be destroyed.

It baffles me.

So what do we do with the old people? Solutions are limited, after all. Do we start clubbing them? Do we hand them Kevorkian kits? Do we just look the other way as they begin to starve or freeze in the bedbug-infested one-room cold-water flats they can afford on their frugal benefits? Do we squeeze the $7000/month nursing care facilities until their staff quits, their facilities degrade, and they become 18th-century asylums where the old sit in their own filth for days on end?

I’m personally proud to be contributing 15.3% of my wages to keeping that old black woman in Los Angeles alive. And some old Jewish man in Brooklyn. And the crazy lady at my Dad’s old care facility who sat at the dinner table and shouted someone’s name every two minutes. And our friend living near her sister in Phoenix who has perhaps already forgotten us. And my mother-in-law who has moved back to Colombia where her pittance of a benefit can actually support her. I’m proud of living in a nation that used to think this kind of thing was important.

I’m deeply ashamed, however, of the current nest of sociopaths on Wall Street and in Congress who are leading this “national discussion” on “entitlements.” As Congresscritters, they should be stripped of their wealth — it could be held in trust for their grandchildren — and forced to live out the remainder of their lives on Social Security. My, wouldn’t that change the discussion!

[1] Nursing care can be had for less than $7000/month. The best prices we found around here were about $6000/month, and it would have been covered by Medicare. We gave that a try. The problem was that the nickel-pinchers in our sociopathic Congress mandated that residents be stacked two to a room, which is cruel and unworkable for many who are in late-stage senile dementia, including (unfortunately) Dad. Because Dad had the house to sell, we opted to upgrade to a single room and spend down his house, giving up the entire Medicare benefit — so we had to pay the full $7000/month out-of-pocket: our inheritance, had we wanted to look at it through the same lens of selfishness that some people do.