August 22, 2008

The amount of debris from our activities which is orbiting the earth increases the difficulty to use space because of the danger of collusions.

I suggest a simple, semi-passive solution to the problem. I say semi-passive vs. active in the sense that an engineer uses rigid vs. flexible design. It also ought to be comparatively cheaper.

I suggest a cone-shaped space garbage truck, lined inside and out with Kevlar®, its walls thickening toward its base, and its base a solid slug. The walls gradually thicken and the base is a slug due to the force of impact with debris.

I can think of two approaches to the inner wall surface. One, make them smooth so that objects glance or slide down them to the base. Two, cover them with angled protrusions that cause the debris to ricochet several times, lessening the impact of entering debris.

Debris entering the garbage cone will gradually fill it from the bottom up.

When it is full, let it fall back to earth in a safe location, burring up along the way.

NASA tracks the location of most all space. This must include the speed and direction. A course for the garbage cone can thus be plotted which has it approaching the debris from behind, instead of head-on. Or it can orbit backwards, facing the oncoming debris, but at a slower speed.

Place the instrumentation package on the outside, about one-fourth of the way back to protect it from debris, and allow access for service if desired. Mounting it on foam to insulate from impact shocks might be a good idea.

Locate thrusters on the outside for maneuvering. There might be workable passive solar or other methods of which I am not knowledgeable. Place thruster fuel canisters on the outside, perhaps replaceable, though with proper design and planning it seems unnecessary. The need to maneuver would be calculated on all the obvious factors, but it seems maneuvering would be necessary due to impact with the entering debris.

The optimum size of the garbage cone would be a function of the size of the debris it was sent to remove, and how long it would take it to fill to a desirable point for re-entry. Which suggests there could be several of different sizes. It also appears the conical shape would allow several to be carried into orbit as a group.

Another option would be to not have it reenter immediately, but remain in orbit as one object to track instead of the thousands of smaller objects and particles it collected, its orbit slowly decaying.

A drawing appears below.

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The Soviet invasion and slaughter in a neighboring country shows we are back to the ceaseless cycle of world conflict and contest.

In the one corner, a small group of nations who want only cooperation and prosperity for the peoples of the world’s nations.

In the other corner, a collection of communist and authoritarian regimes that want domination and control of individual thought and life for their state and religious purposes.

Light vs. dark.

When there are heavyweights in the ring, one does not send in lightweights.

Thinking the foe vanquished, we in the U.S. have frittered, played and wandered through the last couple of decades, while the Soviets[1] have quietly rebuilt. While we have run up debt and sent production capabilities abroad for cheaper trinkets at home, the Soviets have tapped vast resources and made our allies dependent upon them.

While we have been tolerantly overrun by unneeded illegals, bankrupted by Islamic aggressors, and fractured into 50/50 divisions on most subjects, the Soviets have eliminated the free press, crushed opposing political parties, nationalized energy and food production, and methodically gotten their internal authoritarian house in order. They are now ready to expand.

While our Congress and political parties hoodwink us bickering over red hearings, and the news media misleads us with shallow coverage of irrelevant topics, the Soviets have consolidated their power, and along with the Communist government in China[2], made allies through resource acquisition worldwide, many of them our Southern neighbors.

From South America to Africa, countries with raw resources to sell, now have long term contracts and economic dependency with two strong communist customers, which will have all of the obvious effects on their internal politics and international alliances, behavior and voting in the U.N. to which some politicians and candidates would cede certain U.S. rights.

And here we are, all a-flutter about an unknown with a nice manner and broad smile running for office asking why can’t we all just get along, if we just wanted to it would simply happen. And while previous generations of teens and 20-somethings have worked their fingers to the bone, risked their lives, and fought to the death to build this home for us and defend it against tyrants, the present generation is ignorantly electing officials as if they were voting for idol contestants on a make-believe television show.

It is the perfect storm for the social destruction of America and the loss of democracies across the whole face of the globe.

The dark forces and our enemies are rising to threaten our lives.

In times like this one does not send unknowns into the ring. Especially an unknown whose past is an enigma, religion widely unknown and unproven, with no record of concrete results at any level, whose metal has not been publicly tested, and who is not known to the heavyweights.

One does not send in a smiling newbie who the strongmen of the world would have for dinner. An amateur who, not impressing with his own strength, would have to prove it through the cost of our children’s lives.

An amateur whose message has been withdrawal and appeasement, ignorant of strongmen who want control not cooperation.

A newbie for whom the strongmen will not back down, and who will have to use our sons and daughters to prove up the strength that he himself does not exude.

A lightweight’s lack will be made up for by our children, whereas a heavyweight will not need them to prove himself.

In the world ring where strongmen are not cowed by lightweights, it’s the citizens who pay the price.

In times like this one stops playing around, gets serious, gets ones’ house in order, and gets hard to work.

In a tough world in tough times one puts a heavyweight in the ring.

Notes

[1] I regret the loss of the Russian people. They are personally great, with a great deal in common with us, and deserve a better government. As with Venezuela, it just goes to show how quickly democracy and freedom can be subverted to their own ends by those in government wanting to make the people dependent upon them.

[2] I love the Chinese people. They are as beautiful, creative, positive, and productive as we. They deserve all of the prosperity they are finally enjoying. It is sad that they remain saddled with those who want to dictate their personal lives and spread that control abroad.

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Personal freedom is the sine qua non of moral development of each individual; it is necessary for the human growth of each and so an essential component of human well-being. Individual freedom of choice within societal life, and the resultant personal gain or loss, is the necessary component for each person’s personal moral development. American society and government structure has for centuries provided a masterful construct of responsible personal freedom and personal development.

Unfortunately, shadows are threatening to darken the brightness of this picture. Some in the 2008 elections are now offering citizens the opportunity to exchange that masterful construct for promised comfort.

Socialist, communist, fascist, and authoritarian regimes are extant throughout the world and provide ample warning to anyone smart enough to think. Concomitant with the presence of any of these forms of societal organization is the directing, ordering, and controlling environ which limits the horizon of individual and collective moral development and to a certain extent dehumanizes mankind.

And now the election of 2008 has candidates promising resurrection and enhancement of these dark practices to Americans, marketing them under happier misnomers. These dark practices were originally offered to Americans in the decade or so on each side of Prof./Pres. Woodrow Wilson’s participation in America politics near the turn of the last century. It was then said that Government was to take the burdens off our shoulders, solve everyone’s personal problems, we need not think for ourselves, and others in government were here to care for us. It turned into a frightening machine of leftist governmental and quasi-governmental domination and control of everyday life until it was later shed by the citizenry.

In the campaign races of 2008 we hear many running for office talking a great deal about turning over caring for ourselves to others of us who would get paid by the government to care about us. Under guise of the mantra of “caring”, those who would have our freedom are running for office with great promises of our receiving something for nothing. Nothing, that is, but the cost of our moral character. And of course we would in the end have to reorganize our daily lives and comply with their rules in order to get what they say they will give. It is impossible for them to deliver it without a massive reorganization of our lives and society.

Socialism and Collectivism is Immoral
Now, while the mere act of living is in and of itself a process contributive to well-being in the individual, the process of life must go much deeper than that if it is to bring each person to his or her highest potential. The circumstantial means which provides this process in its fullest is freedom, an essential component of humanness. This fundamental right is recognized as a common standard by the world community in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (see www.unhchr.ch). It is held as a fundamental inalienable right, a self-evident truth, precisely because it is recognized as an essential human need.

Perhaps this is why the development of man’s societal arrangements has shown a trend towards it as provided through a free form of government, and why many of those in the world today who do not have it want it. Perhaps also this is why God gives us the right to accept or reject Him.

But I need to show why freedom is essential, and it is to that task I now turn.

Why Freedom is Essential
The why here goes to the dependent nature of man’s relationship with society.[1] Aristotle’s theory held that only in society can man (a term which historically includes both sexes) be most fully human because society is the only association wherein men’s subordination to other men is ordered on principles of justice, fairness, and equality.[2] A fully human life would not be possible were one alone, because humans are inherently social beings.[3] Indeed, all are persons-in-relationships and social interaction thus permits the very personhood of each individual. Only within society does the opportunity obtain for achieving the highest intellectual and moral development. Therefore, the structurestructure of the daily and lifelong activities of the personal individual forms, shapes, colors, and tones the nature of one’s mind set, character, spirit, soul, and self-image.

The Moral Kind Of Authority
Therefore, as to the rulers and the laws, the right kind of authority is democratic authority exercised in the common interest.[4] Rightly constituted laws must be the final sovereign reflecting the constitution, which is adopted by the people and which reflects the sovereign people. The regime is elected by the people and may be called into account by them for failure to conform its behavior to the prescribed conduct. Its purpose is merely to facilitate and coordinate those aspects of societal affairs which the citizens are not individually capable of providing and managing in an efficient or consistent manner. Society is not a supreme moral authority, but rather provides the only condition within which morality is possible. It serves as a frame of reference within which moral actions are intelligible.[5]

Only a relatively free and open societal structure provides the social environ most conducive to personal development and happiness. Its practical resultant is an environ of maximum available opportunities to exploit the human potential: satisfaction of our quite naturally inquisitive appetites; sensory stimulation through total freedom to create or perceive any form of art and culture; the opportunity to travel widely and freely; the wide range of forms of play available; the stimulation of the mind by the knowing of myriad viewpoints made possible by wide-open, robust, uninhibited discussion and debate; the deep genuine feeling of belonging and purpose one receives from being able to read, discuss and question widely, conceive an idea which will help answer a local or societal need, and present that idea for public consideration, the opportunity to join autonomous groups and devise independent approaches to answer individual and community needs; the satisfaction of being personally responsible for the management of one’s needs and problems in life; the free availability of forms of spiritual worship available to each; in short, the maximum opportunity for each to pursue his or her personal choice among the available human Goods.[6]

Actual Support For Freedom and Right Societal Constructs
Although most free thinkers would recognize this theoretical construct as a given, we need not settle for intuition, as the construct is not unsupported by physical evidence.

In the first place, that this sociopolitical theory is both internally and externally valid is evinced by simply looking about the world at the practical manifestations of the main political theories as they are found forming the structure of the various nation-states: Few who have ever lived in free states would choose to live in a controlling state.[7]

In the second place, there exists extensive reliable empirical research on people’s patterns of reasoning about moral decisions which sketches a comprehensive picture of the way in which individuals develop morally.

Lawrence Kohlberg has identified six stages an individual goes through in achieving moral maturity.[8] The omnicultural validity of his findings, according to this descriptive theory, has been established with a high degree of reliability.[9]

Most important for our purposes are the four qualities of this stage development.[10]

Socialism is Immoral Because it Blocks Moral Development
If, as the theory posits and evidence supports, moral development occurs in the transformation of cognitive structures, with the early stage correlative with external rule, then a regime that provides a societal structure which organizes people for the most part through controlling means inhibits their growth to higher levels of moral development. This is because it encourages only a morality of submission to its rules. But these rules are external rules of compulsion, peripheral to the person’s conscience, not internalized principles of motivation.

As Kohlberg’s students Duska and Whelan stated:

If a person spends his whole life doing what he has been told to do by authority, merely because of fear of authority (stage one), or because it will bring him pleasure (stage two), or because it is expected by the group (stage three), or because that is the law (stage four), he has never really made moral decisions which are his own moral decisions. He may be acting in accord with laws, but is he accepting these laws because he is conditioned to accept them, or because he has chosen them as the most ideal? If I do something my father approves of without examining whether it is acceptable, I am merely following my father’s principles, not my own. One must be one’s own person, so to speak, in order to mature fully. One must develop one’s own principles of judgment and action. It will not do merely to follow what one has been told.[11]

To the extent that moral decisions remain out of one’s hands and are decided by another, one’s moral development and growth is retarded. To rise to a higher level of moral development one has to be stimulated, and the necessary stimulation is the responsibility of choice-making.[12] Therefore, the more social, economic, and political freedom a societal structure provides, the greater the opportunities for the moral development of each citizen.

In fact, that freedom is the sine qua non of moral development; it is necessary for the human growth of each and so an essential component of human well-being.

Based on a recognition of all the foregoing (the why), it is clear that the abandonment of personal responsibility to a socialistic or caretaker government form of government nor program is immoral in that it prevents the moral development of each person. Just like the leftist caretaker welfare society of the 1960s and 1970s destroyed the black family in exchange for votes, it will next destroy the entire American family.

A free societal structure thrusts upon its citizens distressing anxiety-fraught dilemmas in which each must exercise choice between his or her wants and others’ well-being. Its structure provides the maximum likelihood that each member will often encounter cognitive disequilibrium and therefore maximizes the potential of effecting movement through the stages of moral development.

This has always been why America has what she has, and is what she is. She is simply the aggregate of her highly moral and personally motivated individual persons.

Regrettably, as I said at the beginning, it is impossible not to perceive the approaching shadows offering to darken America’s brightness.

In the election of 2008 bad socialist and fascist constructs, previously tried and rejected, are again being peddled to the citizenry by those who would prefer to control them, rather than having them control themselves. Personally, I would rather be the observer of ten free eagles than the caretaker of a hundred in a zoo.

I can only hope that through the internet time remains for the citizenry to mutually educate itself on these matters, which for decades have been excluded from education and pubic discourse in preparation for this moment of America’s history.

Endnotes
[1] Though there are differences, John Rawls argues a societal structure which is closely similar to the following Aristotelian construct. Rawls argues that maximum equal personal liberty for every member of a society is necessary for the wellbeing of each individual, indeed, for the justice of the society as a whole. See J. Rawls, A THEORY OF JUSTICE, at §§11, 29, 31-40 (1971).

[2] THE POLITICS OF ARISTOTLE esp. bks. 3 & 4 (E. Barker trans. & ed. 1946 rpt. 1978).

[3] Id. bk.1, ch.2.

[4] Id. bk. 3. Aristotle and his contemporaries meant by the term “democracy” something greatly different from what we mean today. Aristotle meant the Athenian situation during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. wherein the democratic practice as we know it today was confined to a very narrow class of citizens from which a large slave population was totally excluded. Historical evolution in the 2500 years since the Athenian situation has expanded the class to all citizens at the national level. On contemporary democracy as compared to that of Aristotle, see M. I. FINLEY, DEMOCRACY ANCIENT AND MODERN (1973).

[5] THE POLITICS OF ARISTOTLE, supra note [2], at ch.4.

[6] J. Finnis’ list of the basic aspects of each person’s well-being essential for achieving “human flourishing” are knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability, (friendship), practicable reasonableness, and religion. J. Finnis, NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS 23 (1980)

[7] For a view that the reality of freedom of choice and random chance in open society so unnerves and uproots the masses that they desire to escape from reality to the fantastically fictitious consistency of a comprehensive ideology wherein they may give up personal responsibility for decision making to an all-encompassing totalitarian regime, see H. Arendt, THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM, esp. chs. 11 & 12 (1951)

[8] L. K0HLBERG, MORAL EDUCATION: INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES 23, 86-88 (Beck, Crittendon, & Sullivan, eds. 1971).

[9] Id. at 34, 41.

[10] R. DUSKA & M. WHELAN, MORAL DEVELOPMENT: A GUIDE TO PIAGET AND KOHLBERG 47-49 (1975).

[11] Id. at 69.

[12] L. KOLBERG, supra note [8], at 43.

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It is critical to some that America be forced to fail in Iraq. A failure would create many positive results for certain interests and people. The following is my estimation of these interests.

Interest #1: The Pacification of America
It is important to many people and interests in America to pull the eagle’s talons and merge America and Americans into their world community. They believe in the world community they are slowly constructing more than they do individual nations.

If America can be forced to fail in Iraq, our shame while overtake our confidence. Textbooks and teachers will instruct this generation and the next that we were wrong, and that we failed. They will teach that withdrawal saved countless lives, and that those who advocated staying-the-course wasted countless lives and would have continued to do so for naught.

Having forced failure and thereby created a situation in which they are right de facto, it will appear that their advice and views should be followed in other matters as well.

It will be used as proof that America can only succeed when it acts in close concert with the world community. That go-it-alone “adventurism” or “intervention” is unsuccessful. That we can avoid such costly mistakes in the future by signing up fully to the U.N. version of world cooperation and use of force. (Afghanistan is OK because there we are part of a collectivist NATO operation, which such interests view as more of a SWAT team police operation than a national war.)

People and interests who advocate that it is best for nations not to go it alone in the world also necessarily believe that it best for individuals not to go it alone within their countries.

The failure will be thus be used as proof to reinforce the correctness of these interests’ domestic positions that everything which is done is best done as part of a collective group. It will be used to convince people that following their vision of nationalized healthcare, employment, child care, and the like is the best way for people to personally go. And since nations don’t matter in and of themselves, (they are just corporate divisions) then borders and immigration don’t matter (it’s just employees moving around among company divisions).

Interest #2: Selling Political Ideologies and Visions
America has always been a land of competing ideologies advocating their visions for how the country ought to go about doing things. The tangible successes and failures of these visions convince people to follow or ignore particular ideologies advocating them. Nothing dissuades and memorializes like failure. Nothing succeeds and energizes like success of victory.

It is therefor a political necessity for the ideology that opposed the war to endeavor to force its failure. It is a political necessity for ideologies at odds with those currently supporting the war to distinguish themselves by opposing the war (otherwise questions like “why you?” and “what’s the difference?” come up; so they take a position of opposition just to be recognizably different and present a choice for voters and for no other reason.)

Interest #3: Our Military Cannot Produce Success
Certain people and interests believe that the military is inherently bad. Nothing succeeds like success, and so our military cannot be allowed to succeed. We cannot be allowed to have an instance that causes us to believe that our military can produce a success. These people and interests believe that success in the world cannot be produced through military action. It is produced only through dialogue and knitting oneself into the international order.

A success in Iraq would result in American pride and confidence in both our nation and our military. A success in Iraq would prove that we can invade, remove a strongman, empower the people with a new system of self-control, and leave as friends set to work together as two nations in the future. If we fail in Iraq America will not go to war for a long long time. The bitterness of the loss in blood and treasure will endure for decades. Our confidence will be sapped as it was after Vietnam. They will bill it as another Vietnam.

These people and interests like our military for show, and do not believe in actually using it for our nation’s particular interest. Doing so is incompatible with working within the world order. It is OK to use the military for “peacekeeping” in the Balkans, Somalia, or in the future Darfur. But not for national protection. They therefore defund it as unnecessary. In this view America is just one subsidiary company within a world corporation. Competing companies are no longer needed or wanted. One corporate roof for the world; one roof over each subsidiary.

As of mid-2008 it is fairly clear that America has just about finished succeeding in Iraq, and is in the finishing stages of creating a stable friend. Pulling out before the completion of that success will likely leave a security vacuum, cause civil disruption and perhaps implosion or civil war, and leave no history or facts to disprove the pull out. Those who are presently supporting staying the course to final victory will never be able to objectively prove it could have been won. A forced failure will remove their ability to factually create that proof.

Interest #4: Mistakes Are to Be Aborted.
Regarding Iraq, certain interests and people fixate on their belief that we got into Iraq by mistake. They relentlessly brand Iraq as mistake, not an opportunity regardless of its origins.

Many of these people are also of the mindset in other areas that if something happens by mistake it must be aborted, that it is always alright to do so, and that there is never any reason not to. The consequence is that no one can ever physically see the wondrous result that what was lost.

Inconsistency is the hallmark of people who think this way. And the inconsistency here is that these people also love the U.N. and assert that the U.S. should only use its power consistent with the U.N. and its permissions.

But the U.N. rules require that America to see the job through in Iraq. As Tony Blair bluntly pointed out regarding the rules at the beginning: “You break it, you fix it.”

Interest #5: Bush Cannot Be Allowed to Win
This reason is purely personal. It is does not originate from a belief. It is simply the bind desire to make George Bush wrong, regardless of valor and the sacrifices invested by our soldiers for the real objective of the nation.
Here, Bush is close to final victory and thus being right. So it has to be personalized and snatched away from him. U.S. interests, reputation, success, primacy, and military capability are not at play in this reason.
If Iraq succeeds, Bush wins, everyone in the media and politics who has railed against him regarding Iraq will have been proven wrong.
Therefore it is critical to force America to fail in Iraq and thereby establish factually forever that Bush was wrong.
If this happens, it will be forever debated whether America could have won had we continued on. And the other side will be left with only making hypothetical arguments against the established fact of failure.

Interest #6: The Goal of Racial Islam on Par with the West
Many interests and people believe everyone should be equal. Why should Iran and other radicals be kept down by us. They don’t mean to hurt us. They don’t mean what they say. They are just reacting to what we do. It is we who are provoking them. If we just leave them alone they will be our friends. This view will ultimately allow Iran and radicals to control the region. They will organize and arm the region as a co-equal to the West. Our kids will die in the ensuing mess.

Interest #7: Something Good Cannot Come from Something Bad.
There are many people and interests within America who do not like America as it was created and configured. America is not good. Its values have been bad and need to be changed. The views and actions by these people are amply spelled elsewhere by them and their opposers, and I need not elaborate on them here.

For present purposes, the result of their beliefs is that because America is not good, America cannot go out into the world and tell other people what they should do. America is not morally correct and therefore cannot act. It is not worthy. It should take others’ advice and do it their way, not our way.

If and when empowered in this democracy, and thus able to control its national decisions, it will be important to implement those beliefs. So the war, a forced imposition of ourselves on another, is inherently wrong and will be made to fail. And by doing so at this junction that failure will seem as though it was inevitable due to our wrongness.

Forcing us to fail in Iraq will corrupt our soul, sap our strength, and make us more ripe for social control from within. And the social changes desired within America has already been announced by these persons and interests.

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If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

–Rudyard Kipling, 1895

When one watches TV shows today, you can tell from the talkers’ expressions and postures that they have their response ready and are simplistically waiting to pounce as soon as the other person stops talking. It is an insult to the viewer.

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I graduated high school in 1973, having gone to high schools in Daytona Beach and Tampa. I recall the idea was to go out and make something in order to make a living.

Later around the 1980’s American’s were told that the U.S. was brilliantly shifting from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. Things were going to be manufactured cheaply overseas by poor people and we smart people in the U.S. would make a living in two manner: (a) taking care of each others’ needs and (b) providing the management expertise and coordination needed by the poor people overseas who were going to be making everything for us.

Next I remember millions of mid-level executive jobs being eliminated by “big” businesses. I know a lot of folks in Florida who used to have those jobs, and ended up mowing lawns and such to make a living since they really couldn’t live on a hourly paycheck from a hamburger joint.

Then came the 1990’s when the economy seemed to prove this service-based economy through the dot-com boom. Everything revolved around computers, and the internet, and how easy it was for everyone to make money through internet technology. Video games took off, reinforcing this image. Factory construction boomed overseas, factories closed at home, and behind it all the creeping corrosion of big U.S. businesses outsourcing their manufacturing to cheaper plants overseas rapidly increased.

I recall a lot of news stories wherein the reporter discovered some lone guy or gal who had to retool their life after having been cut from a mid-level position at a company that was outsourcing, and who had struck it rich via the internet in some manner, and therefore anyone could do just that. These stories bred a myth and floated more hope.

The internet’s ability to enable anyone to talk to anyone internationally for free (a first in human history) seemed to reinforce the belief that outsourcing and globalization was a sound method to produce the money to pay the bills at home, and that it would not come to prevent us from making a decent living.

Next, when the dot-coms were all collapsing, came the housing boom which ran from the very late 1990’s until about 2006. And the nation zoomed along on real estate, or at least believed it was.

The housing boom crashed abruptly to a full dead stop in 2006. And now we are beginning to perceive that it is likely no wealth was built at all, either in the structures themselves, or in all of the mortgages funding them, or in what is perhaps just a whole lot of worthless paper related to them which has been traded around by the big boys. It seems like we have way more houses built than we need, more houses than we have people who can pay for them, and a tremendous amount of money sunk into developing millions of vacant subdivision lot inventory that will lay unneeded for years. And they are all worth maybe half of what people thought they were.

People can’t pay and are walking on their loans.. The guilt over the failure to repay ones’ debt is gone the way of most other morals which supported America and have been gradually removed by teachers, professors, media and élites since the 1960s. Everyone has been taught not to care about human life, or the notion of personal responsibility. So why should they care about debt repayment? Like everything else it is not a matter of morality. Besides, it’s not their fault someone else got them into the mortgage on the house they wanted. (In May 2008 I declined to represent a man in a bankruptcy whose mind worked as follows: he thought he should solve his problem by counter-suing the bank in the state court foreclosure case for having lent him the money he wanted — because the bank should have known better. And I’m sure he would have threatened them with age discrimination or some such had they not lent it to him when he wanted it). In modern America, it is now always some else’s fault. Just ask the personal injury lawyers. Which means it is not their responsibility.

Now, it seems to this Average Joe (me) that this is the situation in which we presently find ourselves:

• The average guy is out of money.
• The average guy is out of a good paying job.
• The bulk of the kids 25 and under comprise the point and click generation, precious few of them have practical skills, and most have little tangible practical understanding of where things come from and how to make something someone else will buy. (One cannot fairly complain too loudly that they do not understand producing money, because neither do their teachers in school or the people in the government).
• No elected officials at any level have any useful knowledge of money or a productive society.
• We do not have factories. Only 12% of our GDP is from manufacturing (per Kevin Phillips, infra).
• Most of our major national corporations are looking out only for themselves, will not refocus to save us, stopped being good corporate citizens over two decades ago, and view the U.S. and all other nations merely as labor pools and raw material sources from which they can hire, fire, and acquire, toward the end of building the corporation. Our major public companies no longer have any particular loyalty to our National Family. As one said when asked point blank in a TV interview, my duty is only to the corporation, to make everything I can for it; my duty is not to the country. [1]
• And we spend all of our time stuck like Dr. Seuss’s east and west bound Loraxes, autisticly bickering and maneuvering about blacks and whites and race while the world moves ahead of us.

And I can’t see where the next big thing is that is going to make everyone a living here in America. Perhaps we’re entering another period of doldrums, just treading water until the next big thing comes along and money starts moving again. Trouble is, it doesn’t seem we even have what it takes to tread water.

• My observation is that most of today’s old people do nothing productive. They live off of the present generation (their descendants) via social security and while away the hours watching TV and the like. Precious few push themselves to do things for others, and absurdly, social security further interferes with their ability to work. My Florida friend Charlie Price and other veterans service people I know like him, such as John Haynes, are the shining exceptions, dedicating endless hours to helping others. What is it about these military folks? They just can’t stop doing good things. More of us ought to follow their example.
• Young kids waste away the hours playing video games, as though beating the next level produces something they can eat or sell.
• Mexican illegals bring no needed skills into the country, displace local citizens, impose the drag of provision of services they do not even receive in Mexico, and send most of their money home.
• The Average Joe is being made to carry the load of the old, the young, the illegals, and one of the current presidential candidates says he wants them to take on the load of medical care for all. [2]
• The major U.S. corporations continue to send production and wealth overseas, apparently gradually transitioning to some form of transnational entities.
• How is the Average Joe or Jane supposed to produce the money to buy anything if every year the amount they can produce shrinks?

On July 4th, 20008, I found myself explaining my thinking to some family members as follows. We were just up the road in Ormond Beach at a small 1,100 square foot block 1940s or so house my brother in law has and has been trying to sell one block off the river. It has no air conditioners and we were sitting on the small back screened porch awaiting the fireworks. My 17 year old nephew Jimmy, sister in law, mother in law, and I were talking. I suggested the porch and the four of us as an economy micro-example. I pay Jimmy to paint the porch. Jimmy pays Nana for food. Nana pays Betsy for medical care. So in a service-based economy all are just passing their money around among themselves. But if we were to manufacture something, say one of the metal folding chairs we were sitting in, or a pie, and pass it out through the screen to the house next door in exchange for money or something else of value that they pass back in through the screen to us on the porch, we have brought something new into the economic mix among us in the closed economy of our porch. And the more times we can make something, pass it out, and draw into the porch more than we took to make it, we are increasing the wealth and well-being of those on the porch. I suggested that applying this example to the larger situation of the nation could provide an example of what gets us ahead and what does not as a National Family.

I am no economist. My wife and I just bring in what money we can and we spend it like everyone else. But for over a decade I have pointed out that I could just not figure out how the poor countries were going to become rich enough fast enough to be able for us here in the U.S. to get our outsourced jobs back via foreign workers having enough increased income from their production in their countries to be able to buy at our prices what we produce here in our country. And now those overseas manufacturers produce not only the low-tech goods but the high-tech goods as well. So what is it that we are to manufacture at our comparatively high wage scales that they at their low pay scales are supposed to buy from us? [3]

I had ignorantly always thought that trade laws and tariffs (trade barriers as some like to pejoratively refer to them) were a method of adjusting things between countries which had different inherent internal costs of production due to their differently developed standards of living. Perhaps I was wrong. I guess even though there are many vast differences among the nations it will just all work out without harm to us. It seems like we argue the effects of internal income taxes to death, but we allow the national ship to be taken into a much larger typhoon over which we have no control. And it seems that has put us in play with large, wholly un-thought-through, external forces, and that what we do internally is now of small result.

I have for over a decade pointed out when asked (which is rare, as I am not a pundit) that America is going to be spent and bankrupt long before the annual income of the average Chinese or Indian hourly wage earner has risen to the point at which they have enough money to buy something we still make here in the U.S., so that we can get our money and jobs back. Money? Oh, that is the money that the huge corporations and banks pool from all the little folks and then take overseas for their corporate benefit.

While I do not like the National Geographic’s humanistic and atheistic agenda (my opinion, not a statement of fact), their special issue, China, May 2008, Vol. 213, No. 5, is a must-read for everyone about where we in the U.S. are headed, absent some fast and serious restructuring and redirection both internal and vis-à-vis other nations:

(1) China is expected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy in ten years, that is, 2018. Peter Hessler, China’s Journey, page 62.
(2) In 2005 China will have more cars than the U.S. and 1,000 cars are added each day. [4] Ted Fishman, Great New Walls, page 142.
(3) China’s factories as of 2008 produce the following, and absent radical action will continue into other areas and these percentages will continue rapidly expanding [5] (Brook Larmer, Bitter Waters, National Geographic, May 2008 p170):
72% of U.S. shoes
50% of U.S. kitchen appliances
80% of U.S. toys

But Larmer reveals that despite the above, at this point in time a Chinese factory worker would have to work SIX MONTHS to earn the cost of a wooden Thomas the Tank Engine train set.

Nobody I know here in America would spend ½ of their annual income on a wooden train set for the kid. And if it takes them ½ year to earn enough for that, it’s a sure bet the average person in China is decades away from buying anything substantial made in the U.S.A.

For all the foregoing reasons I am of the opinion that a huge economic restructuring is approaching. It may be within the U.S., but it might also be world-wide because of our remaining markets size and it effects. If you are a reader willing to work consideration of something all the way through, it may be that everything is so mangled that at some point the U.S. will announce that it is resolving the problem by canceling its foreign debt. The U.S. could just do so, or it could attempt to justify it on the moral claim of having saved the world a couple of times and a lot of other smaller places in it several times. It could be that the values of everything are just cut by 2/3. It could take the form of cancellation of trade agreements and resurrection of tariffs and the like. [6]

But at this point even if the U.S. reenacted various protectionist laws and reopened all of our factories:

(a) the bulk of our citizens are broke and no longer earn enough to buy their products at twice the price, and
(b) we could not sell to other countries because they can buy the same items for half the price from China and India.

And with our internal and external debt we may not be much of an economic powerhouse. But as I say, I am not an economist.

On July 5, 2008, the night after the family conversation I recounted above, to my surprise I saw a man, Mr. Kevin Phillips, giving a talk on his book Bad Money. Mr. Phillips who, unlike my economically ignorant self, is a brilliant financial man and knows many things I would never know to even think of that are affecting the bigger picture of which I am one small part. I listened to him clearly elucidate many complex factors behind everything I have seen going on as discussed above. We Average Joes have heard generic names for those things here and the in the media, such as “hedge funds”, or “mortgage-backed securities”, but have no inkling of what they have to do with money, or the health of the domestic economic context in which we each must produce a living. I was in college for nine years, earning several degrees. And I learned that one can always tell when someone understands something complex, because they can explain it in simple terms to someone who knows nothing about it. From his discourse one can tell Mr. Phillips understands them well.

I recommend reading his book to see all the past things leading up to the present, but because of it all, Mr. Phillips sees several things clearly that I was seeing only dimly.

1. He cannot see anything that is next to drive our economy.
2. He cannot see anyone in our government who does.
3. He sees energy costs as a trigger to the economic pressure point, the thing that will prevent the problems from hiding any longer.
4. He sees that no one in the national government (elected, appointed or hired) understands the economics of our economy any longer.
5.He sees that the government has removed risk-danger controls by socializing the high-finance economy. By bailing out the risk takers every time their gambling goes too far and gets them into trouble which could drag us all into trouble with them, the government has left the reward with the risk-taker and shifted the absorption of the loses to the average Joe, thereby emboldening the gamblers by entirely removing their risk.[7]
6. He sees that the financiers have constructed the current economy as a house of cross-collateralized cards, about which the productiveness, true worth, and physical nature is wholly unknown. (That is, they were our economy during the real estate boom, and now people are realizing they have no idea what the economy was or what it is now worth).

Now, for someone to work their way out of a debtor-creditor mess they have to have a job and something to work with. To have a job they have to:

(a) make something that people want to buy,
(b) perform a service for which someone will pay, or
(c) have a government job paid with money taxed (taken) from others. [8]

As between most people within the U.S., having something to work with is already a problem. And as between the U.S. and other nations, what of marketable value do we have to sell or offer? Just as the value of a company stock declines while the company is in trouble, our mess has caused U.S. currency to lose value steadily at the international level.

We cannot manufacture things more cheaply than China or India [9], so who will buy from us? We need our oil and cannot export it and sell it to them. Sell of our natural resources to the foreign manufacturers? Are we to export military protection? Like a rent-a-cop or mercenary? That is certainly not in our character. That is not what we have ever been about and would demean and ultimately ruin us. Perhaps we can put the essential substance of food on par with the essential substance of oil. [10] But in our current culture of corporate globalization and greed I can see the big corporations getting involved and ruining this like they have everything else.

The government and politicians are in the business of keeping things calm and avoiding civil unrest. They are not in the business of alarming people. Even dictators do not strike alarm or panic, instead rallying people behind them against perceived or created threats.

1. Our government will not likely step to the microphone and announce we have a major problem. They can’t even be honest about things which are small in comparison like social security, Medicare and Medicaid.
2. They do not much understand the current economic complexities. Just look at where we are.
3. Competing political interests of a now diverse and competing population will militate against an honest discussion of the problem and the process of honest solutions to it. It will become lost in demographic slicing, dicing, and division.
4. All of this happens in a context where there is a large block of educators, media, and others who want America dethroned, and will work against the actions and people trying to stop that from happening. They have worked toward this moment for years, and will work against an honest discussion designed to prevent it.
5. There may not be much the government can do about it anyway. Think of our nation like a company, when another company comes along that can do it cheaper. If we can’t re-tool or find something else to do we’re in trouble.

For 24 years I have been a debtor-credit and bankruptcy attorney. I have noticed that nowadays virtually no home foreclosures can be resolved by a Chapter 13 bankruptcy (in which people can reschedule their home mortgage when they are behind). It used to be that people fell behind on a mortgage because of a death, or temporary unemployment. Now the principal causes of mortgage defaults are (a) their job has been lost or their income drastically reduced (fuel prices exacerbate both these causes) or (b) the mortgage payments have increased and people cannot increase their income to keep up.

The house can only be saved if the bank will reduce the debt owed to the true current value of the house and re-amortize the payment to the resultant lower level. Which the banks will not do. One reason is that they are dense and are still thinking like the “old days” when it would be the only foreclosure on the block, soon to be resold to the next buyer. Another reason is that doing so would instantly create huge losses on their books and reductions of their worth. Therefore the banks are sitting on the whole big mess and keeping it booked as value, as though it had some.

It is often said that you can’t get blood out of a turnip. Given everything discussed herein, and the overall economic mess in which it no longer appears realistically possible that the Average people who in the end will have to support this place can in fact go out and earn or produce more, it may be that some will suggest that there is only the solution of a massive revaluation of property, massive elimination of debt (leaving it with those who took the risk for the hoped-for profits they would have kept to themselves), revaluation of the property and the currency, or the drawing of a line across the books, and a starting over.

For me, my plan is to try and move from my current small-lot subdivision and to a reasonably sized rural parcel just outside a metropolitan area. A parcel upon which we would have some space and if need be provide for ourselves a bit more of what we need. My father was a child during the great depression. He lived in Moors New York, which is near Plattsburgh on the Canadian border. He says that other than gas rationing they had it fairly easy because it was rural and everyone could produce most of what they needed and trade it around. City people were dependant on food being dished out to them through all of the obvious attendant complexities and obediences when money and economics are in disarray.

___________________________
[1] They grow up in our schools, got to our churches, play on our teams, hang out like other kids. Then they go to work for a huge corporation. And it is as though they renege on their Americanism. It is as if there is a hat rack just outside the door of the corporate meeting room, and as they walk in they hang their various hats on it. They take off their hat labeled Christian and hang it up. Their hat of Patriot. Their hats marking them as fathers who want jobs for their kids and their friends when they grow up. Stripped of everything they were taught as America kids, they do anything for profit, to the exclusion of the health of their community and National Family. Or maybe it’s gone the way of most of the other morals which supported America and have been gradually removed by teachers, professors, and élites since the 1960s.

[2] It is fairly easy to see the logic of the Average Joe who now feels that health care ought to be socialized (the kinder non-threatening term is “universalized” or one more notch up the rhetoric scale would be “nationalized”). Through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, reasonable health care was available through reasonably priced insurance which very often was available as part of a job package. If it wasn’t, private insurance was reasonably affordable. When the large public corporations came to delete jobs to line their pockets with quick short-term gold by sending the jobs overseas, they did way with this. Many jobs that were left came to not be able to afford to provide it, and so eliminated it from the benefit under the jobs that remained. Probably the public sector jobs are the ones that more often provide health insurance now, and the private sector continues to shrink. Coincidentally all of this intersected in time with the miraculous expansion in medical technology and medical ability with the necessary attendant costs in discovering, producing and providing that expansion of miraculous detection tests and treatments. So a lot of average Joes now feel that if American Business doesn’t give a damn about me, is going to send my job overseas, is going to get rich of the taking of my job, produce an economic environment in which I cannot afford to get insurance to care for damn my family, then I am going to want you to pay for that medical care through the govern via your corporate taxes. And given the misconduct of our major corporations, it is a bit difficult to morally argue with that reasoning.

[3] A man named Lou Dobbs is on CNN. Were I ever asked publicly my opinion of him I would say that he is a brilliant thinker who think about ten ahead of everyone else. I have passed through his show period over the years and listed to him warning about the race to the bottom.

[4] They have 4.25 times the people we do. 1,300,000,000 to our 304,531,000. So shutting the U.S. down for the sake of the world environment won’t solve that problem either.

[5] An aside on security. The U.S. prevailed in WW2 by converting its factories to make war materials. And all of Chinas present and coming factories, with their accumulating skills and technology, can also be retooled in like manner. While the U.S. factories and workforce skilled in manufacturing and technical production declines. If push came to shove in a decade or two, guess who be in a position to push harder.

[6] It could be that a new federal level administration which is more predisposed toward socialism as a solution could seek to solve the problem by submitting the U.S. to the U.N. under a world income redistribution in exchange for certain debt and economic guarantees.

[7]The cornerstone of conservative capitalism is that the risk-takers keep their winnings, but also keep their losses. Just like at the dog track. Let the super-rich who invested in huge things like hedge funds and kept their stunning profits during the good years, take their own loses. Let them have to shovel more money into their company to save their investment when it is in trouble. Today’s idiots in Washington do not see the enormous danger of taking from the poor to carry the rich through their temporary crises. These people also own the credit card companies, which charge the average folks exorbitant interest rates on the basis of risky credit ratings, and assess huge penalties for late payment. If the politicians knew how to think like that, instead of bailing out huge funds with favorable rates they would hit them with the same exorbitant rates and penalties that everyone else who does not keep their house in order is hit with. Being able to get into trouble, be bailed out, and not even have to pay a penalty, is socialism, except those at the top keep the rewards, with everyone else servicing it and underwriting it.

[8] Even government jobs are now shrinking, at least at the state level. Florida has twice cut state department budgets by 10% due to shrinking tax revenue resultant of the defaulting value of real estate. Sales tax revenue is also falling.

[9] They do not have our costs. We have built up a standard of living over the years, legislating social security, Medicaid, Medicaid for the older years, and Workman’s Compensation to protect the workers family from accidents during the working years. The cost of compliance with and litigation over sexual discrimination laws, age discrimination laws, product liability laws and damages, race discrimination laws, become part of the production cost of each items produced ad sold by a workplace in the U.S. Most of the countries taking over the manufacturing jobs do not have any of these costs.

[10] Some of these thoughts were passed on to me by my Arizona friend John Wunder.

© TruthForUs.com. All rights reserved.

Excerpts of this material may circulated by email with reference to www.TruthForUs.com, but permission is required for re-publication, broadcast, rewriting or posting on other sites.

Martin C. Boire
www.TruthForUs.com

Note:  I am adding to this list as I have time and think about it.

• It’s a Wonderful Life, as many times as you can
• The Blues Brothers, many times.
• The 6th Day, 2000, why cloning is a bad idea
• The Sound of Music
• Terminator, the trilogy
• British public television version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Note: I saw this when I was in law school, so it was produced around 1981-84, and the last word might be “to the Universe”)
• The God’s Must Be Crazy. 1980’s, I think.
• The Secret Garden, 1980’s (I think) version. Might have been public television. British or American. A children’s version, I think.
• Places in the Heart. 1990s, I think. Starred Sallie Fields.
• One Crazy Night. 1994.
• Bed knobs and Broomsticks.
• Most anything with Audrey Hepburn.
• The River Queen
• The Replacement Killers
• Deep Impact. 1998.
• The Goonies.
• The Princess Bride
• The Ten Commandments
• The Passion of Christ by Mel Gibson, (when kids are in their late teens)
• Home Alone (#1 and #2)
• Hocus Pocus
• The Patriot
• Swiss Family Robinson
• Second Hand Lions
• The Fifth Element, 1997
• Gone With the Wind
• Star Wars
• Star Trek (except voyager).
• Big Fish
• Open Range
• The Princess Bride
• Harry Potter
• Love Comes Softly, the trilogy
• Kelly’s Heroes

TV Series:

• Magnum PI
• Kung Fu
• McCale’s Navy (spelling?)
• The Rifleman
• Gunsmoke
• Little House on the Prairie
• The Wild Wild West
• Lost in Space
• Johnie Quest - original cartoons, not PC new remakes

Note:  I am adding to this list as I have time and think about it.

mail@TruthForUs.Com

The thing about solving the world’s problems is that as soon as you do, people will invent a whole new crop.
– Martin C. Boire, 2007

Good quotes strike clarity through confusion. You can’t codify common sense.
– Martin C. Boire, January, 2007

Life is the most complicated learning experience ever devised.
–Martin C. Boire 

Discourse is not so much about what one thinks, as why one thinks it.
–Martin C. Boire, July 11, 2008

Why create a ritual?  Because then people need you to help them through it.
– Martin C. Boire, 2007 

It’s what they believe makes them the way they are.
- - Martin C. Boire

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
–G. Gordon Liddy speaking for Bob Hansen

Behold, the fundamental weakness of the criminal mind, they believe nothing and no one.
– Mr. Browne, in the movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks

People who want to control everything for the benefit of everyone else, usually end up quite better off than everyone else.
– Martin Boire, 12-2007, on socialism and communism.

Europe raises its citizens to know their place. America raises her citizens to make their place.
– Martin C. Boire, 6-2007

How do we celebrate diversity if we don’t celebrate our differences?
–Martin C. Boire, 12-17-05

How do we celebrate diversity if we don’t enjoy our differences?
–Martin C. Boire, 12-17-05

Do we “celebrate diversity” by removing any mention it?
–Martin C. Boire, 12-09-05 (re Christmas Season vs. “Holiday” Season)

Abortion is a life altering experience.
–Martin C. Boire, 12-02-04

The key to good parenting lies in the art of distraction.
–Martin C. Boire, 1991

Conservatives provide a safe and stable environment for liberals to act silly within.
–Martin Boire 4-15-04

The best way to predict the future, is to create it.
–Martin C. Boire, August 15, 2004

Do not come to die, and find that you have not lived.
–Martin C. Boire, late 70’s, ala Thoreau

Ronald Reagan – The modern father of our nation.
–Martin C. Boire, 6-5-04

George Washington gave us our Country.
Ronald Reagan gave us our Country back.
–Martin Boire, 6-23-04

For America so loved Iraq that she gave her begotten sons and daughters that the people of Iraq should not suffer, but have everlasting freedom.
–Martin C. Boire, Easter, 2004

Liberals recognize the right thing to do only after a conservative has done it.
– Martin C. Boire, June 2004

We are fascinated by our toys instead of being focused on our character.
– Martin C. Boire, 9-27-2003

If two men on a job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, then both are useless.
– A jewel from Junk Email

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
– A jewel from Junk Email

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.
– A jewel from Junk Email

With well doing you may put to silence foolish men.
– A jewel from Junk Email

There can be no defense like elaborate courtesy.
– A jewel from Junk Email

The Gateway to Christianity is not through an intricate labyrinth of dogma, but by a simple belief in the person of Christ.
– A jewel from Junk Email

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
–Mark Twain

To know that you know what you know, and do not know what you do not know, that is true knowledge.
– Lin Yutang, On the Importance of Living

We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
–Winston Churchill

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
–George Bernard Shaw

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© www.TruthForUs.com. All rights reserved.

Excerpts of this material may circulated by email with reference to www.TruthForUs.com, but permission is required re-publication, broadcast, rewriting or full posting on other sites.